No Family is Perfect
by Flavato Forever
Summary: An unknown piece of Flack family history surfaces and comes to New York. Featuring Don Flack, his family (Sam Flack, OC) and Jamie Lovato, along with some other characters. AU-ish. Occurs post-finale. **I do not own cover image nor any of the characters found in CSI:NY**
1. Chapter 1

Don sips from a glass of cranberry juice, the only drink he has in his apartment other than beer, and winces. He had purchased it a few months ago, goaded by Jamie on one of those trips to the supermarket where his girlfriend's ideas of good food invaded his own shopping cart. It was most likely expired by now, but you can't very well serve Budweiser to a sister who was supposed to be a recovering alcoholic.

When ancient, bitter liquid is clearing an acidic path down your throat by means of just about destroying everything it touches, it is very hard to be sympathetic to other people's problems, Don muses. Problems like an insatiable need to be drunk.

Why couldn't Sam just _not _be an alcoholic? Why couldn't she, just this once, have a bottle of beer and not _require _more? Or, even better, why couldn't he have some while she drank this God-forsaken juice? It was his apartment, after all.

His mess of a younger sister had dropped by unannounced ten minutes earlier. Out of that weird kind of familial love that can transcend years of betrayal and disappointment, Don had invited her in, despite the late hour. Now she sat on his couch, looking pretty terrified.

"Don, I got something to tell you."

"About what?" He attempted nonchalance while internally bracing himself for a confession to a relapse.

"Do you remember Svetlana?"

Don racked his brain, which was fogged by the past eighteen hours he had spent awake, as well as the alarms going off in his body from consuming something that was most likely older than the latest addition to the Messer family. Eventually, though, he managed to pull a face out of the recesses of his memory.

"That exchange student who came here when you were a senior?"

"Yeah."

"I guess. God, it's been decades, Sam. What about her?"

She pauses, looking at the deep purple liquid in her cup. "She dated Patrick, remember?"

"I guess so. She was only here for a few weeks. Why?"

"He got her pregnant."

It takes a moment for Don's tired brain to register the few, clipped syllables.

"He got her pregnant?"

Sam nods, trying to gauge how he was reacting.

"Did she have the baby?"

She nods again.

"That was sixteen years ago, Sam. Why didn't you tell me then?"

"Patrick just told me a few days ago.

"So why are you telling me now?"

"Svetlana just died. Her kids are all being sent to their father's families. But Patrick says he's too busy with work, so he asked Gran…"

"So the kid…

"The girl. It was a girl. She's coming here, to live with Gran."

Sometimes it seems that the moments that you most need a drink are those when you cannot have one.

* * *

><p>Anna Nabieva is currently in a plane on the tarmac of John F. Kennedy International Airport, taxing over to Gate 13C. The entirety of her living relatives in New York were sitting in three seats just outside security waiting for her. Notably absent was the girl's father.<p>

Allegedly, someone had given Anna a picture of the family, so that she would know what they looked like at the airport. The Flacks had not received any pictures of her, nor had any direct contact with the teenager, leaving them with many unanswered questions, the most pressing of which was to what extent the girl knew English.

The family, an abnormal group of sister, brother, and grandmother, wait in silence. At nearly ninety, Georgia Flack wasn't really in the shape to take care of another child, though she seemed best suited out of the three present to do so – or, at least, the one who was most reliably sober and available.

This was the fourth time the group had gathered in JFK's international terminal in the past week. The first time, they had discovered, after waiting for the better part of an hour, that the flight from Moscow that Anna was supposed to be on had been canceled, and she was rebooked on a connection through Berlin. A day later, they made the trek out through the infamous New York traffic, and that flight had been canceled as well. Anna bounced from Germany to Italy to France to Spain, before finally landing a flight across the Atlantic, but, apparently, the Delta staff in Barcelona aren't really up-to-date on international relations, because the poor child got all the way to Havana before someone told her there were not flights from Cuba to the United States. She bounced across the Americas for a day, and was just now coming to New York.

Five minutes pass, and then the sign announcing flight status says that Flight 8594 from Quebec had de-boarded. Six eyes turn toward the stairwell, an action which was rather pointless, considering no one knew what Anna looked like.

Eventually, a young girl approaches the Flacks, and they suck in a collective breath of anticipation.

The sixteen-year-old was verifiably gorgeous. She had a pale, narrow face, framed by bright red hair that hung down to her belly button. A tall and lean figure was shown off in a tight long-sleeve top and jeans, with muscular arms, grasping a small suitcase and backpack, a flat stomach and chiseled legs with the ever-coveted thigh gap. She floated across the airport, the swarms of people seeming to clear a path for her.

"You must the Flacks. I am Anna," she said when she got within hearing range, in a thick but intelligible Russian accent.

They start the awkward introductions – no one present was taught how to act in front of a teenage family member you did not know existed until a week ago. Anna seemed unperturbed.

"We should go get your bags from baggage claim," Don suggests.

"I did not check luggage," Anna replies.

"That is all you have?" The two bags could not hold much.

"All the possessions I have accumulated over my 16 years of existence, yes."

There was the answer to one question – her English was pretty damn good.

* * *

><p>It was ten at night Eastern Standard Time, but to the Anna's boy, it was somewhere around eleven in the morning. Despite half a week of travel, she did not appear tired at all.<p>

The whole group from the airport sat in Georgia's living room. The remnants of a dinner the elderly woman had spent all day eagerly preparing – mostly emasculated by the announcement, from Anna, upon entering the house that she was not hungry in the least – were on the table. Anna sat, legs crossed, on one side of the living room sofa, exuding confidence, in spite of the long plane ride and unfamiliar country.

She had detailed what she called her "grand tour of world airports" on the drive home, drawing laughs from all three Flacks, and not just of the polite kind. Her tale of navigating the maze-like terminals in Florence left both Don and Sam in tears.

She listened eagerly to the summary Don gave her of the American side of her family. From what Don could gather, she seemed friendly, warm, bubbly, almost, and completely untroubled by the awkwardness of her current situation.

"Tell us about your family," Sam says. "Or, the other side of your family."

Anna thinks for a moment before beginning.

"We – my siblings and I – grew up living with our mother, and her occasional boyfriends. I have nine siblings," – at this Don raises his eyebrows – "two older brothers, two younger brothers and five younger sisters, who are all currently en route to or residing at one of their paternal family's residences. Except both my older brothers, who are legal adults and live on their own."

"All your siblings have different fathers?" Don asked, almost accusingly. The girl seemed unbothered by his tone, which was harsher than he had intended.

"Yes."

"What did your mother do?"

"Various things. She switched jobs often. The only thing she really did consistently was shoot up heroin."

The listeners jerk slightly. "Heroin?"

Anna cocks her head, looking confused. "Heroin? It's a drug?"

"No, I know what heroin is." Anna smiles. "But your mom… she was an addict?"

"Yes. She started out with marijuana, I think when she was perhaps sixteen or seventeen. It escaladed to heroin when I was around two, I believe. Perhaps before then, but that was when my older brothers became aware of her using."

None of the Americans present seem sure of how to precede, despite – or perhaps because of – their superior knowledge of the language being used. After a moment, Anna continues as if the pause had not occurred.

"My mother died three weeks ago. She walked in on a burglary, or so it is believed. The police in our town were not exactly enthusiastic about investigating her murder, and no one was, how you say, 'breaking down doors' for answers. Ironic, I suppose."

"Ironic?"

"Her death. Or, rather, the means of her death. She smoked three packs of cigarettes a day from the time she was fourteen, she drank like a sailor coming off a bad divorce, and she injected enough illegal substances into her body on a daily basis to knock out an elephant, and she died of a gunshot wound to the chest."

"You have really good English," Sam says, attempting to steer the conversation away from death and drugs. "What part of Russia are you from?"

"Thank you. I learned my English in school. I am from a small town called Krasnokamsk, about seventeen hours northeast of Moscow."

After a moment, Anna picks up again. "My two younger brothers and one of my sisters now live in Russia. One of my sisters is in Germany, one in Ontario, one in Baltimore and one in Boston. And now I am here."

It takes a moment for this information to sink in. "And now you are here," Georgia repeats.

"What do you two like to do, for fun?" Don asks, for lack of anything else to say.

"I dance," Anna says. "Competitively. It is quite common in Russia. I also like football – ah, soccer, I mean – and tennis."

"I don't doubt it," Sam says, eyeing the girl's muscular legs showing through her tight pants.

"Doubt what?" Anna asks.

"That you play so many sports."

"Why would you doubt that?"

"What?"

"For what reason would you doubt that I play the sports that I just named?"

"No, I…" Sam shakes her head. "It's late. We should be getting to bed."

This starts the long process of familial goodbyes, hugs and kisses and promises to visit soon. Anna watches quietly, dutifully hugging her aunt and uncle before they leave, and seemed to catch on quickly to the Flack habit of kissing cheeks.

Once in the elevator, Sam takes a deep breath.

"Can you believe that?"

"Hmm?" Don is distracted by his desire to sleep.

"That her mom did heroin? And had all those kids?"

"What I can't believe is that Patrick all but washed his hands of her."

_His loss_.


	2. Chapter 2

Don sits across from his girlfriend, enjoying the biting yet warm sensation of a small sip of Irish coffee going down his throat. Jamie is wearing that purple sweater he loves, which hugs her hips in exactly the right place. Even after a double shift, her smile manages to light up the small café. The place is crowded and noisy, but the clanking of dishes in the back cannot permeate the detectives' small sanctuary of post-work drinks.

"So, what is she like?"

Don thinks a moment before replying. "Warm. Polite. Very… open. She'll tell you anything, and I can't tell if it's a cultural gap thing or just something about her. I don't know. How do I talk to her? What do I say to her?"

"Oh, come on, Don. Talk to her like you would any other kid. I've seen Mac assign you to the kid cases; they all love you. And Anna's probably pretty freaked out. Can you imagine? Moving across the world, away from your family, to people you don't know? Trust me, there's no way she's expecting anything more from you than to be nice to her." As is usual when he's tired, Don focuses more on the movement of Jamie's beautiful lips than her words, and he has to reach back through his brain when she's finished talking to register what she's said.

"I'm sorry. We've been talking about me this whole time-"

Jamie reaches her hand out and places it over his. "Hey, I think you have license to dominate the conversation for a couple coffees."

Don chuckles softly. "No, but really, how are you?"

Jamie scoffs. "You know how it is. If some scumbag decides to kill another in a nasty alley in this city, it comes down on the lowly third-grade detectives."

"I remember those days. I don't miss them."

"At least your suspects are checking out your ass while you're trying to interrogate them."

"Hey, there've been a couple of times…"

She playfully smacks his hand, and they both laugh.

"I saw your grandmother today," Don says, before taking another sharp mouthful of his coffee.

"Oh, really?"

He nods. "Yeah, ran into her at the dry cleaner's."

"How was she? I haven't seen her in a while."

"Fine. She seemed healthy, happy. Mentioned this new club she joined or something. Ah, what was it…"

"Oh, not the meat society."

"That was it – Harry's Cuts or something?"

"Harold's Cuts, yeah." Jamie rolls her eyes. "It's all she talks about now. It's some mail-order thing where they send you a different cut of meat from all over the world twice a month. I swear, every time she gets a package, she calls me and tries to start a conversation over Turkish veal or British sirloin. I can only blame myself; I kept telling her she needed a hobby after she retired."

"At least she didn't get into an illegal senior gambling ring."

"C'mon. There are no such things."

Don nods, enjoying the lovely look is disbelief on Jamie's face. "Messer and I shut one down a few years back; can you imagine putting ten grandmas in cuffs and driving them downtown? The media had a field day – I can still see the headlines: 'NYPD Now Persecuting for Baking Cookies and Pinching Cheeks.'"

Jamie laughs without reservation, showing nearly the entire top row of her shining teeth.

"Meat society's not lookin' too bad now, huh?"

She shakes her head, causing her hair to fall forward, covering her cheek. Don gently brushes it behind her ear.

"Speaking of Messer, how are he and Lindsey doing with Louis?"

It is the third time Jamie has brought up babies while the two were alone together, a fact that is not lost on Don.

"Apparently they have slept a combined seven hours in the past two weeks." He considers adding that he does not envy them, but was afraid that would lead into a deeper conversation than he was ready to have at after being awake for twenty hours. "How are Martin and Isabelle doing with Hailey?"

Jamie smiles at the mention of her brother and niece. "Similar reports of sleeplessness."

"My mother sure complained about us as newborns enough when we were growing up."

"Do you ever see Patrick?"

The question catches Don off-guard, and his face betrays his surprise. Jamie looks as if she is going to apologetically change the topic, but Don speaks before she can.

"Almost never. LAX to JFK isn't exactly a quick flight."

"He doesn't comes back to visit? What about holidays, birthdays?"

Don shakes his head. "He burned all his bridges here. Always wanted to get out of the city. Sam and I used to joke that the traffic got to him, but it's not like he really escaped it, going to LA. I never really understood his obsession with leaving; I love this place. I can't imagine living anywhere else. But New York was never Patrick's home, I guess. He left as soon as he turned eighteen, and I haven't seen him since, except for our parents' fiftieth and Grandpa's funeral. I mean, you must get that. David moved away young, didn't he?"

Jamie purses her lips slightly. "To Baltimore, and only for a baseball scholarship to UMD. Not exactly across the country; and he comes back for all the birthdays, Christmases, weddings, anniversaries, everything. He's gotta be some sort of gold member with Southwest, he flies here and back so much. And we're on the phone with each other all the time."

Don shrugs. "Patrick just wanted to get away."

"What does he do?"

"I'm not even really sure. I call on his birthday, and, if I get him when he's home, that's the only time we ever talk. Last I heard, he was some bigwig banker, and looking at some of those million-dollar-view type houses in Pacifica."

"Not carrying on the family tradition?"

Don laughs. "Let's just say you definitely can't afford the houses he likes on a city salary."

"Does he a wife? Kids?"

In his sleep-deprived state, Don almost lets a sarcastic _You mean other than the one he abandoned to us? _slip out, but he stops himself. "Not that I know of, though I'd probably be the last to get that kind of news."

"And he doesn't even want to come _meet _Anna?"

"Like I said, he burned his bridges."

Jamie shakes her head. "I can't imagine that – not wanting to even see your only child."

"Think of how Anna must feel. She's never known her father, and now, even when she had nowhere else to go, he shrugs her off."

Jamie grasps Don's hand again. "That's not true. She has you, and Sam, and your Grandma. And from what you told me, that's a pretty big improvement on her life before she came here."

Don smiles slightly before leaning in to kiss his girlfriend. He throws a twenty on the counter, and then the two detectives walk out together into the rainy night.


	3. Chapter 3

Work keeps Don busy, and he does not see he niece again for two weeks after their first meeting. He gets almost daily updates from Gran, in the form of phone messages he could barely find time to listen to. Anna talks too much and eats too little for the elderly woman's standards, and dances to any music that is playing. Her English is all but impeccable; she reads everything she could find, and seems excited about going to school when it started up in late August. When she showers, she keeps the water running for all of two minutes, but blow-dries her hair for twenty and stays in the bathroom for another half hour of top of that, for reasons unbeknownst to Gran. ("How long does it take the poor child to put on clothes, for God's sake?") A point in her favor is her willingness to learn bridge, Gran's favorite card game, and she is extremely good at it so far. She and Sam are apparently already thick as thieves, as she had spent one night there, and when Gran went to pick her up they were braiding each other's hair and talking about their favorite movies.

One Friday, after a particularly grueling day at work – six hours in the interrogation room with a New York City lowlife who absolutely refused to reveal the whereabouts of his accomplish in jewelry-store-robbery-turned-homicide – the phone message he listened to over lukewarm microwave-heated leftovers is short. _I'm going to a bridge tournament this weekend in Long Island and Sam's busy, so I need Anna to come stay at your place. I'm going to drop her off at your house at ten tonight._

Don sighs and puts his fork down. He can hardly refuse the retiree her greatest pleasure – competitive bridge games – and he know he is better suited for keeping a teenager than his sister, however close the two were. But he has work tomorrow and little to keep the girl occupied while he was gone.

The clock over the stove reads 9:37, so he really doesn't have any other options but to accept Anna and hope she brought a book.

Thirty minutes later, there is a sharp knock on the door. He opens it to find his niece standing in the hallway with a huge smile and the same backpack she had been wearing when they first met. His grandmother had shrewdly sent her up alone, not giving him the chance to argue.

Anna had already eaten, and agrees to watch the Yankees game, though she admits she knew next to nothing about baseball.

Don turned the TV on mute and asked his niece what she thought so far of New York.

"It's much warmer than where I am from. And bigger." Her eyes light up with the description. "There are so many people – it seems you could have dinner with a different group every night for years and not repeat once. Where I am from, everyone knows everyone. Why are they chewing gum?"

It takes Don's tired brain a moment to realize she has moved to talking about baseball. "Oh, them? It's just something baseball players do. They used to chew tobacco. Now it's more gum, sunflower seeds, stuff like that."

"Won't they choke when they start running?"

"No, the players – especially the ones out in the field, the ones who aren't batting – they don't really run all that much."

The conversation continues in this way, small narratives by Anna interrupted by periodic questions about baseball. She seems to not understand the appeal of the game, with the never-ending strike-outs and few exciting moments, but watched until the end without complaint.

Don thinks back to his coffee with Jamie. Just be nice, she had told him. That's all Anna will expect.

But how could he apologize for everything that had happened to her since his brother had abandoned her before she was even born? How could he express that, if he had known about her and her situation, he would have so happily taken her from her mother, and taken care of her? Would she appreciate that? What would she be like if she grew up here, instead of some unheard-of tiny town in freezing Siberia?

For now, he simply lays some sheets and blankets over his couch, and kisses his niece goodnight.

* * *

><p>The blaring alarm, snoozed one-too-many times, pulls Don from some odd dream he will forget by the time he finished his first cup of coffee of the morning. He forgets there is another person in the apartment for a few minutes, brushing his teeth in a daze. He will be late for work, and rush hour traffic in New York was deadly. So he is slightly startled, disoriented, to find Anna awake, dancing to the radio while doing dishes in the kitchen.<p>

He watches her dance for a minute. Her movements are obviously unchoreographed, and he doubts that she was familiar with the song – it is one of those obscure decade-old pop atrocities – but she floats around so gracefully, so happily, it is impossible not to be infected with her joy.

"You don't have to do that," he interrupts, motioning to the sink full of dirty water.

She looks up and smiles. "It's not a problem."

"Well, thank you, then. I'm sorry I have to rush out, but I'm late for work. Do you think you'll be okay here all alone?"

"I'm sure I'll be fine."

"Okay. Help yourself to anything in fridge."

He considers making coffee, then decides against it, since he's already going to be walking out the apartment door a good half hour after he was supposed to be reporting to the precinct. At this hour, he will be stuck in stop-and-go for at least forty minutes. He kisses his niece's cheek and runs to the elevator.

There's no service in the claustrophobic box, nor the parking garage, so, by the time he reaches into his pocket for his phone to call Mac, he realizes he's left it in his room. He curses under his breath and settles in for an aggravating commute.

* * *

><p>"Has anyone seen Flack?" Mac calls through the lab. His question is met by noncommittal head shakes. Danny, the best bet for an answer, is at a crime scene, as are Lindsey, Jo and Jamie. Flack's phone was going straight to voicemail, either dead or off. He was late, and the case they were working was moving quickly.<p>

"Adam." The man looks up from the computer, where he is going over month after month of phone records. "I need you to go to Flack's apartment and make sure he's coming in today."

"You need me to go to his apartment?" Adam's eyes widen.

"Yes. Now."

"Okay. Okay. I'll go to his apartment. Now. I'm going now." He jumps up, nearly knocking over his desktop in the process.

Had either Don or Adam been paying attention, they would have noticed passing each other, going opposite directions, on 28th street. But Adam was double checking that he had the right address and Don was fiddling with his car radio, so they both continue their treks through the thousands of Manhattan commuters.

As Adam was riding in the elevator only recently evacuated by the man for whom he was looking, Anna was rinsing ketchup off a plate, and ended up splashing some of the reddish-brown cream on her shirt. In order to properly rinse the stain, she had to slip out of her top, leaving only her lacey bra and leggings.

Adam stands in front of Flack's apartment door for a solid three minutes. Why did he have to wake the guy up? In all honesty, after Mac, and maybe Jo on a bad day, Flack scared him most. He was beloved by half the police force, and respected by the rest, and Adam had seen him on more than one occasion scare a suspect into tears. This was definitely not in his job description. What is he was sick, or hung over? What if he answered the door with a gun in his hand? Adam knew computers, not guns. What if there was no answer at all? Should he go in? How would he even get it? Can he simply go back to the crime lab, empty handed?

He finally works up the courage to knock, and, as one might suspect, is scared speechless when the door is answered by a girl without a shirt.

"Hello, may I help you?" Anna asks.

"Hi, yeah, um, hello, I'm looking for Don Flack?"

"Oh, yes, he left maybe-" she glances behind herself, to the hall clock, "twenty minutes ago. Is there something I can do for you?"

"No, no, I'm just making sure that, you know, he left, and everything's okay, and, um, hey, can I ask you a question?"

"Of course."

"Are you, a, um," he barely whispers the word, "hooker?"

"A what?"

"A hooker."

"A hooker?"

"You know, a, um, a prostitute?"

When the foreign word finally registers in Anna's mind, she breaks out into a fit of lovely high-pitched giggles. Looking down, she realizes she does, in fact, look like a prostitute.

"No, no," she barely manages through the laughter. "I'm not a hooker. I'm Don Flack's niece."

Adam's face goes bright red. "Oh, oh, okay, I see. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to offend you, really, I just-"

"Don't worry about it. I _totally _look like a prostitute. What's your name?"

"Adam. I work with your uncle. I didn't know he had a niece, so, you know, I was confused when you answered the door, and…"

"And I didn't have a shirt on? Yeah. Quite understandable. Well, it's nice to meet you Adam. I'm Anna. I wish we perhaps could have met under different circumstances – preferably in a situation where I was not half naked. But, ah, _se la vie_. Can I offer you something to drink, or eat? Coffee, water?"

Adam is about to respectfully decline, run back to the car and pray the girl doesn't tell her uncle about their little exchange when Mac calls.

"Boss?"

"Are you at Don's?"

"Yeah, he already-"

"He's here. Is his niece there? A Russian girl?"

"Anna? Yeah." Panic sweeps over Adam, as he gets the irrational idea that his boss could somehow know that he called the girl a prostitute.

"Is she okay?"

"Yeah, she's fine, I guess."

"She's not hurt?"

"Not that I know of."

"I need you to get her and bring her to the precinct. Don's just gotten a death threat."


	4. Chapter 4

The ride to the precinct – made much more comfortable by Anna's retrieval of another shirt from her backpack – is shorter than the ride from it. Rush hour had begun to clear up, as much as it did on the island, and less than twenty minutes after Adam got the call, he and Anna were walking into the police station.

The relief is evident on Don's face at the sight of his niece, unharmed. She sits patiently through his questions. Yes, she is fine. No, no one came to the apartment, besides Mr. Adam. No, she did not notice anything unusual. Yes, she locked the door behind her. Once Don was satisfied, Anna sits down in his desk chair and opens her book while her uncle works with Jo to compile a list of possible threateners.

Time passes easily, with Don writing name after name of people who might want him dead and Anna reading without complaint. After about an hour, she looks up from her book and pins her eyes on her uncle. It took him a minute to notice, being preoccupied with digging into his memory for all the murderous asses that had been chained in his handcuffs in his career, but he eventually meets her gaze.

He starts to ask her what is wrong, but she speaks first. "You're left-handed?"

He nods, eyebrows raised, ready for what was sure going to be an interesting conversation.

"So I am. My mother said I must have gotten it from my father, because she always remembered that you were left-handed, and no one on her side of the family was."

Don wants to express that he is happy to share this characteristic with her, that he is relieved, somehow, to be able to show that they are connected in a way that she was not with her father or Sam or Gran, but Anna went on before he had the chance.

"Have you ever wondered at the fact that 'right' also means 'correct'? It is not this way in Russian, but it is in English, and I believe many Western European languages. There has been a stigma against left-handed people for such a long time. Even now in parts of China, left-handed people are pressured to learn to write with their right hand, because the order in which strokes are written when writing Chinese characters is very important, and the whole system was built by right-handed people for the practicality and ease of other right-handed people. It's amazing what we will discriminate against. Of course, in the West, white people soon started to meet black people and Native Americans and started to hate them based on race, and I supposed handedness as a means of separating the 'better' from the 'worse' sort of fell to the wayside. More convenient to use skin color, being so readily visible and difficult to hide, I suppose. But the signs of hating left-handedness are still there. Vestigial prejudice, if you will."

She glances down at Don's hand again, and seems to notice for the first time that he is working. "Oh, I'm sorry. I'll stop bothering you." She looks back down at her book, and Don is left feeling like he lost a crucial opportunity. He realizes he did not speak at all during the entire exchange.

While Don's list grows to encompass a sixth page of cheap, government-subsidized paper, Detective Lovato releases the suspect she had been interrogating. His alibi was more solid than most of the ones that passed through her interrogation room, despite his clear motive and smug attitude, and she is left chew her cheek angrily on her way back to square one. But all annoyance disappears when she sees a stunning redhead sitting at her boyfriend's desk.

"You must be Anna," Jamie says when she gets close.

The girl looks up, smiling automatically. "Yes, ma'am."

Jamie sticks her hand out, and Anna shakes it. "I'm Jamie. I work with your uncle."

"It's very nice to meet you."

Jamie sits down at her desk, opposite Anna. "How are you holding up? This whole situation must be pretty crazy for you, yeah?"

Anna looks around, as if sizing up the precinct. "Quite crazy, yes. It is not exactly what you expect of America."

Jamie raises her eyebrows and asks good-humoredly, "What _do_ you expect of America?"

"Oh, you know, football games. Hot dogs. Starbucks."

"Do they have Starbucks in Russia?"

"Of course. Nearly everywhere, now. But it's still thought of as a specifically American thing. I don't care for it much myself – I prefer tea. Though I suppose Starbucks barely even counts as coffee, does it? It's all sugar and cream and weird mixes of fruit juices at those places. But such is what some people like."

Jamie studies Anna as she talks, and realizes what is striking about the girl's face.

"Your eyes," she blurts out without thinking.

Anna brings her hand to her face. "My eyes?"

"They're red."

The girls' irises are a startling mix of cherry flavored candy and blood, a perfect match to her hair.

"Oh, yes. I have some sort of pigment deficiency, I believe. Apparently, my body can only produce red and white. Nothing else. As you can see." She holds out her snow-pale arm for proof.

"They're… stunning."

"My mother used to say it made me look like a _vampir_."

"Your mother called you a vampire?"

She laughs, a sound like bells. "Yes. With love, of course."

"Of course," Jamie echoes quietly, remembering her conversation with Don from the previous week. Images came to mind of the drug addicts' children she has seen: slight kids, dressed in threadbare hand-me-downs, perched on bare mattresses stained with God-knows-what, surrounded by heroin needles. Told their whole lives that they looked like storybook monsters instead of storybook princesses.

"My mother looked quite different. She said she had blonde hair when she was young, but it was a rather dark brown by the time I was born. And she had the most amazing eyes. They were this icy grey color. And I know what it sounds like. You know, grey? Wouldn't that just wash out her entire face? But the thing is, it didn't. Her skin was pale and her eyes were grey and she was just so absolutely lovely. And all my siblings – they all look so different. My one sister has hair like, like – oh my goodness, I could describe her so well in Russian."

The narrative continues, an endless stream of excitement that contrasted so beautifully with the dark building that bureaucratized crime. Anna stops every few minutes to ask if she was interrupting some important police business, but Jamie continually assured her that she could keep talking. The girl's apple-colored irises light up with so much enthusiasm that, despite her case going nowhere, despite her stomach complaining that she had had nothing to eat all day except seven cups of coffee and a sandy-tasting granola bar from the vending machine, despite the vivid memory of the previous night when she had dropped by her brother's apartment and her sister-in-law had answered the door with a purple-black bruise around her eye poorly concealed with hastily-applied make-up, Jamie couldn't help but smile, and she wanted to badly for the happiness to carry on infecting her small, dreary precinct. Anna drew her in like a magician, captivating her, making her forget the pile of paperwork on her desk and the list of twenty phone calls she had to make by five when the businesspeople left their offices and the weight of her eyelids drooping over her bloodshot scleras and the fact that she remembered the world sclera from high school but she had forgotten her grandmother's birthday the previous week. Anna was describing in detail her oldest brother's fingernails – his _fingernails_, of all things – and acting like it was the most important topic in the world, and talking to Jamie like one of those down-to-earth, beloved teachers might talk to a student at the best sort of class, a lecture that was enchantingly interesting and didn't contain a single ounce of material that would be on the test, and Jamie felt weightless.

"Lovato, where'ya at with the Wilson case?" Her CO's voice broke the Russian girl's spell with a precision developed over decades of interrogation. Jamie's head whipped around and she immediately began a recounting of the current – bleak – situation, but the ever-charming Detective Clyde was already moving across the room to find another slacker to scream at.

Jamie turns back to Anna, but cannot get a word out before the gentle, accented voice again fills her ears. "I'm so sorry, I totally forgot you were working and not just hear to talk to." Her delicate hand touches Jamie's arm. "I'll stop, I'll stop."

Jamie wants to say that it is fine, that she isn't mad in the least, that, if she had her way, she would listen to Anna talk and talk and talk for hours, but she couldn't seem to form the words. And yet somehow, looking at the girl's bright, toothy smile, Jamie believes she understands.


	5. Chapter 5

The death threat turned out to be nothing – a kid, two months shy of his twentieth birthday, just out of jail from a possession charge for which Don had sent him away a year ago. In interrogation, he had gloated to Mac that his genius plan involved killing Don with a shard from a broken plastic plate because "my cousin cut himself on one of those motherfuckers once and it hurt like a bitch so I figured that's how Flack was supposed to go out." Don could almost have thanked the boy; the stress of it had all prompted his CO to allow him to go home early.

The rest of the day passed by uneventfully. Anna had chattered away through the ride home and their late lunch of spaghetti that had hung around in their stomachs through the dinner hunger and negated a third meal of the day. She'd talked and talked, but the topic Don had been dreading – Anna's father – never came up.

Gran had picked Anna up that evening, as Don and his niece were watching another Yankees-Mets game. (That had let to an interesting conversation.

"They play each other twice in a row?"

"Actually, right now they'll play each other three times in a row."

"_Three _times in a row?"

A detailed explanation of the concept of series left Anna mystified about the entire premise of the American pastime. She watched the game in awe after that, periodically muttering in what sounded like Russian, though it was hard to tell if her accent was simply slanting English words into something more foreign.)

No more than fifteen minutes after Anna left, Jamie calls, asking if it is still okay for her to stop by. Don had forgotten about the plans he had made before the urgent need for him to play babysitter cropped up, but he tells her it was fine. He needs some normalcy.

Jamie mercifully does not mention the Mets win, instead simply accepting a beer and planting herself on the couch next to Don. Grace trots her way from her bed in the corner to press a cold nose on Jamie's knee, entranced as usual by the detective's way with animals. Jamie ignores the dog, instead leaning her head on Don, setting under the arm he wraps around her shoulder. The baseball game replays are still flashing on the TV, the pseudo-meaningful commentary from the has-been announcers muted.

"Does a sport even really count as a sport if you can chew gum while you play it?"

Jamie shifts a bit so she can look at her boyfriend. "Is this a lifelong Yankees fan talking, or a Russian girl who has never watched baseball in her life?"

Don smiles at Jamie's perceptiveness.

"She's so sweet. I wonder what she would have been like if she had grown up in a different home. Would she have been nicer? Or is it some kind of inverse relationship – if she had grown up with two normal parents, would she have been a brat?"

"I can't imagine Anna as a brat."

"Neither can I – but I've only known her a few weeks. Who knows?"

The room is silent for a moment, and the image springs to Don's head of raising Anna with Jamie. Don sees a world where Svetlana had the child and sent her to America; he and Jamie get married, move in together, become parents. He sees the midnight baby screams, the toddler tantrums, the little league softball free from analytical questions, the preteen angst. Anna and Louis are best friends, and this is the movie where they fall in love, and the Messers and Flacks are linked forever by the bond of soul mates.

But Louis is barely ten weeks old, and Anna is sixteen – as if that is the only problem with the fantasy.

He and Jamie had just celebrated their one-year anniversary days before the big news of a long-lost Russian niece. Does he want to marry her? Will they have kids? They haven't talked about it. When should they talk about it? Does it mean something, the fact that they haven't talked about it yet?

Don wants nothing more than to sit peacefully with his girlfriend and enjoy her kind presence, but the silence is stretching out into an expanse of anxiety-inducing questions, so he forces a conversation out of his tired lips.

"How are you? What's new?"

Jamie considers telling him about his sister-in-law's bruised eye and the fear that her brother was turning out exactly like their father, going down a path of gangs and jail and premature death. But the moment feels so lovely that she can't bear to weigh it down. She digs into her mind for some pleasant news and ends up talking absentmindedly about the new tenant who moved in down the hall from her apartment.

"He plays the violin, and I was worried he'd be up at all hours of the night practicing, but he's been here for eight days and I've only heard him play once, around three in the afternoon, and it was quiet and pretty enjoyable to listen to."

"Is that his job, playing the violin?"

"No. I get the sense that he's some big business guy. Every time I've talked him his phone is ringing every couple minutes, and he dresses like he's somebody important. But I haven't really talked to him much – just once or twice, as I've passed him in the hallway. You know how it is. He's Russian, I think. Or Ukrainian. Thick accent. Maybe Anna knows him," she jokes

"Even if she doesn't, she'd probably like to talk to him, just to be able to speak Russian."

"If he is Russian."

"If he is Russian," Don agrees.

For a moment the only sound is two sets of lungs breathing just out of unison. Jamie breaks the silence.

"Have you ever thought about how your apartment is Gracie's entire world?"

"What?"

"Like, these, what is it, four, five rooms are the only places she has ever known."

"That's not really true. We go on walks all the time."

Jamie pauses, brows furrowed, before twisting so that she is facing Don. "Okay, then, take Belle." Don imagines his girlfriend's perky cat. "She never leaves my apartment. She probably doesn't even grasp the idea that we live in a building full of other people – maybe she doesn't even know that there is anything else in the universe, other than the rooms she's allowed in. The windows probably just seem like TVs to her."

"Or maybe the TV seems like a window to her. Maybe she thinks there are just a million people in that box, living out their separate lives whether or not we watch them."

"She'd have to be pretty stupid to think that."

"I think either scenario requires her to be a little stupid. I mean, not realizing that the people on the other side of the window are real?"

"True." The surge of excitement in Jamie, evident in her building volume, dies down as quickly as it had come, now that her theory was out there and shriveling under the light of scrutiny. She stays quite for a few beats.

"But still, it's not like she stares longingly out the window for hours. She must think that her world is more interesting than the outside world, which would realistically mean she didn't comprehend the extent of everything that happened out there."

"Well, she couldn't understand _everything_ that happened outside, because she only sees a tiny cut of it."

"But even the one block – fraction of one block – that she sees would probably be more entertaining for her than whatever she does in my apartment all day. What do pets do all day, anyway?"

"Sleep, probably. Hopefully keep out of trouble. Lick their feet." Foot-licking was probably Grace's favorite pastime. She could spend hours twisting herself into every position imaginable to get the best angle on one of her paws. The vet had sworn up and down that she wasn't reacting to any obscure medical problems; he claimed she must just like having clean feet.

"What if all our animals somehow broke out during the day and got together and got into all kinds of shenanigans while we were at work?"

Don laughs. "You should write a book, Lovato."

Jamie smiles and settles back beside Don. Her eyes find his two bookshelves, perhaps goaded by the suggestion of writing a novel to rest upon them. She remembers the first time she came to his apartment, after the Valentine's dinner he had put together seventeen stories up. She hadn't exactly been focused on apartment décor when she first arrived, but the next morning she had spent twenty minutes studying the bookshelves over an NYPD mug of steaming coffee.

Flack hadn't really struck her as a reading kind of guy, but nearly an entire wall of his modest living room was taken up with every genre imaginable: mind-numbing classics, modern thrillers, comedies, play collections, biographies. They were mostly unorganized. It looked as if Don had started to do an alphabetical type thing, but when the volume of pages surpassed the New-York-minimal space, he simply started shoving them anywhere there was room. Books lay vertically, horizontally, hanging halfway off the shelves – the whole operation looked haphazard and beloved. It reminded Jamie of her own reading collection.

"Anna likes reading, yeah?"

"Mm."

"Maybe she gets it from you. Did Patrick like to read?"

Don tenses slightly at the name of his brother, and then relaxes. "Not particularly. But I didn't really either, when I was a kid. Too many boring school books, I guess."

"Does Anna read in English or Russian?"

Don thinks back to the huge book his niece had carted to the precinct that morning.

"Both, I guess. She was reading _War and Peace _today. But she might just be reading in English here because it's hard to find Russian books."

"Tolstoy's Russian."

"It was an English translation, though." Don watches Gracie move from licking her back left to her back right paw. He imagines her inner monologue: _oh, look, I have another foot, I forgot_. _Better lick this one, too_. "What does Anna do all day, I wonder?"

"She probably plays bridge with your grandma."

"All day? She's been here, what, three weeks? That's a lot of bridge."

"As if your grandma would get tired of it."

"I should do something with her. I just have no idea what she would like."

"What about baseball game?"

Don laughs. "You should've seen her, Jamie. She thinks baseball is the weirdest sport out there, and that the entire country's crazy for liking it." He adopts a Russian accent. "They play _three _games in a _row_? And you watch _all _of them? The players aren't even _doing _anything right now. They're just _standing _there chewing _gum_."

His accent is bad, but he captures Anna's energy masterfully. Jamie smiles.

"Okay, no baseball games. Oh, what about reading? You guys could read a book out loud together. I used to do that with Maria."

Don says something that's probably decently witty about _War and Peace_, but Jamie isn't listening. She's thinking of that dark blue puddle that had bloomed its way over Maria's mother's cheek, after, Jamie guessed, her brother's open hand or – god forbid – closed fist had burst a hundred delicate capillaries there. Jamie imagined that same hand tucking Maria in at night, or decidedly not tucking Maria in at night, leaving the seven-year-old lonely and cold and unable to sleep, as Jamie herself had spent too many nights before her abuela had taken her from her parents.

Tomorrow. Tomorrow she would go and talk to Isabelle, Jamie told herself. But for now, she allowed herself to enjoy the weight of her boyfriend's arm around her shoulders and the wonderful calm of her, for once silent, cell phone.


	6. Chapter 6

Jamie stands in front of her brother's apartment, hand raised, poised to knock, but cannot find the strength to bring her knuckles down on the door. She was sure that Martin worked Sundays at the auto shop on 49th street; she'd stopped by a hundred times when he wasn't home. But what if he was sick today? She couldn't talk to Isabelle with him there, and she hadn't thought of an excuse for stopping by. What would she say if he answered the door?

This is ridiculous. She'd shared a room with Martin for seventeen years. She comes by the apartment all the time. She is police officer, for god's sake. She'd stared down the barrel of a gun more times than she could count.

Before the wave of courage can subside, she knocks sharply three times. She hears rustling inside, quick words she can't make out and two sets of footsteps, one rushing towards the back of the apartment, one coming towards her. After a moment, the door opens, revealing Maria.

Jamie's niece is a slight girl, with long, curly brown hair that hangs down her back and flies into her face whenever she runs around. Her large brown eyes look up innocently at her aunt, and she pulls the sweetest of smiles to her lips.

"Tía Jamie."

"Maria, cómo estás?"

"Muy buena. Y tú?"

"Buena, gracias. Is your mamá home?"

"She's in the bathroom."

"Can I come in?"

The girl moves her small body to the side, allowing Jamie to enter. The apartment is small; there is a single bedroom, a single bathroom, and an open kitchen that runs into the combined living and dining room. Maria used to sleep on a mattress on the floor in her parents' room, but Hailey's crib had displaced her; now she sleeps on the sofa in the living room. Soon they'd get a pull-out couch, her brother kept saying.

The place is moderately messy. A pile of laundry, half of it folded, takes up one side of the couch. A day's worth of dirty dishes is stacked semi-precariously in the sink. Shoes are scattered about the floor in the entranceway, and Jamie must watch her step to reach the sofa. Maria sits down next to her, squished between her aunt and her tee shirts, and pulls a half-completed drawing into her lap.

"What's that?"

"S'a flower."

Jamie points to what she now sees are petals. "I like how you made some of these red and some blue."

"Thank you."

Jamie runs her hand through Maria's hair, and feels the girl lean into her. She watches Maria drag worn-down crayons across the paper for a minute. When the bathroom door opens, Maria stops coloring, but does not look up.

Isabelle comes into the room softly, holding Hailey on her hip. The baby is plump and rosy and adorably sticky, in stark contrast with her mother's thin frame. Isabelle has been trying to lose weight since Hailey was born, but now, Jamie thinks, she must be lighter than when she got pregnant.

"Jamie, buenos días. How are you?"

"I'm good, thank you. How are you?"

She slowly lowers herself into the chair across from the sofa, shifting Hailey into her lap. "I'm good," she breathes quickly without looking Jamie in the eye. The contented sounds coming from the most recent Lovato child could not cover the tension in Isabelle's voice. She wears holey sweatpants, a stained tank top, and the weight of the world on her protruding clavicles. Her hair is greasy, and the bruise around her eye is only slightly less visible than it had been two days prior. Jamie could not tell if it was healing or if the woman had simply become better at concealing it.

"Is Martin home?"

"No, no, he's at work. He always works on Sundays."

"Of course."

The strained conversation pauses. Both Jamie and Isabelle watch Hailey suck on her hand.

"Isabelle, how _are _you?"

Isabelle seems to nod slightly, as if she expected the question. "Maria, how about you go and draw in mamá's room, okay?"

Maria keeps her chin tucked into her chest as she takes her paper and a handful of crayons back down the hallway. Isabelle does not seem to be preparing to address the question Jamie had just asked, so the detective tries a more direct approach.

"How is your eye?"

Isabelle brings her hand to her cheek. "Oh, this? Funny, actually. I was trying to do three things at once, as usual, carrying a laundry hamper downstairs to where the washers are and talking on the phone, and when I walked through the front door, I pulled it too hard and slammed it on my face."

"Isabelle…"

"I just covered it with makeup because I didn't want the neighbors to think anything, you know. I must have forgotten to mention it when you stopped by the other day."

"The bruise isn't square. You can see the knuckles," Jamie murmurs.

Isabelle looks away, covering the offending mark with her fingers. Hailey seems to sense the change in mood, and begins to cry. Isabelle bounces her knees to calm the baby. The motion in her legs causes tears that had been welling in her eyes to spill over onto her bony cheeks. Jamie leans over and gently touches her arm.

"How long has it been happening?"

"He's not a bad man, Jamie."

"I know. How long has it been happening?"

She takes a jagged breath. "Four months."

"So since…"

"Since Hailey was born. It's just, it was so hard, with being up all night, and then taking care of Maria as well, and I wasn't doing all that I should have been. He works and all I do is stay home, and still I asked him to watch both kids so often-" She breaks off, waving her hand dismissively.

"They're his kids, too, Isabelle."

"I know, I know, but he works…"

"That doesn't make it okay."

Isabelle lets out one choked sob. The couch is placed close enough to the chair to allow Jamie to wrap one arm around her sister-in-law.

"Maybe if I had just worked harder."

"Don't do that to yourself. This is not your fault." Jamie pauses, choosing her words carefully. "How… often?"

Isabelle composes herself quickly. She's following the pattern Jamie has seen too many times: break down and confess, realize what you've done, hurriedly cover your tracks. "Really, never, almost. Twice, maybe three times. And it's not like… he doesn't hit me hard. He doesn't even mean to. He just gets angry sometimes. Please, don't worry about me. I'm fine."

Jamie sighs. "Isabelle, you're not fine. This isn't okay. You're worth so much more than this."

She sees Isabelle's mouth begin to form the word no – _no_, she's about to say, _no I'm not worth more than this _– and then stop. "Jamie, I swear, I'm _fine_."

"Okay, okay. You're fine. What about Maria?"

Isabelle's manufactured smile slips almost imperceptibly. "He's never touched her."

_Yet_. "But what is she learning? You're normalizing this to her. When she grows up, if – god forbid – her boyfriend or husband starts hitting her, what will she do? Will she talk about how late he works or how she should have done more?"

"She won't think that."

"Why won't she?"

"Because she'll know."

"She'll know what?"

"That… it's not okay."

"The same way you know that it's not okay?"

"Jamie, you don't understand."

"I know that you think I don't understand. But this is not okay. It's not okay for Martin to hit you, and it's not okay for Maria and Hailey to grow up around Martin hitting you."

"What is there for me to do? Leave him?"

"Yes. Keep yourself safe. Protect your children."

"I have nowhere to go."

"Come stay with me. I have a spare bedroom."

"I can't do that to you."

"You're mi familia, Isabelle. You're welcome any time."

"But Martin – you don't know how he gets. If I left… I don't know what he would do."

Jamie bit her lip. She hadn't realized it was this bad, hadn't wanted to believe it was this bad. "Isabelle," she whispers. "Are you scared for your life?"

"No, of course not. Martin would never…"

Hailey begins to cry, one of those out-of-the-blue infant wailing attacks, the kind that makes everyone within earshot curse the months it requires for a baby to develop speech. Isabelle looks like she's been brought back to reality, as if the sharp sound has broken the intimacy of the moment, allowing her to remember her station in life.

"I need to feed her. And Maria must be hungry."

Jamie checks her watch; it is in fact quickly approaching lunchtime. Her own stomach is protesting its emptiness by pounding an empty feeling of fatigue into her limbs. She feels the unwelcome energy floating off Isabelle; she has overstayed her welcome.

"I'll go. But please, call me anytime. Think of Maria and Hailey."

Isabelle nods, no longer really paying attention. With one last pat on her sister-in-law's shoulder, Jamie gets up to go. She casts one last glance into the apartment as she's closing the door behind her, and sees Maria peeking out from her parents' bedroom, staring silently at her.


	7. Chapter 7

On her normal way home from the park where she enjoyed reading while breathing in some not-so-fresh New York air, Anna had to walk under two sets of scaffolding; one was slowly strangulating an old brick apartment building, the other a rundown church. It was unpleasant, to say the least, for a girl who had grown up in one-story houses whose roofs had a tendency to cave in if the snow depth spent too much time hanging around the wrong side of two feet (which, consequentially, happened a lot in Russia). Anything other than open sky or a very, very sturdy ceiling above Anna's head causes her heart to beat just a bit faster, a thin layer of sweat to coat her pale palms. So when a third set of scaffolding went up on her route, she decided it was time to find another way to get home.

And of course, though the streets were numbered with the utmost obviousness, on the first day that she took a new direction, she got terribly, terribly lost. She figured that, if she was deviating from routine to avoid going under three sets of the haphazardly erected metal, she may as well avoid scaffolding altogether. And that was her fatal flaw; in New York, avoiding scaffolding is about as easy as avoiding taxis.

About two hours after she left the park, she decides that she was never going to find her way home. She considers asking a stranger for directions, but chooses to spend just a bit longer sightseeing. New York is so intriguingly different from the town in which she grew up; she could spend hours simply watching the myriad of people pass by.

As she studies the pizzeria championing _the best pizza in town! _in bold, neon letters, she realizes that this area looked somewhat familiar. Yes, she has seen that sign before, with its "a" twisted nearly beyond recognition for a non-native speaker. And the bench at the bus stop, with an advertisement for a lawyer. She has definitely been here. She walks down towards the corner, hoping to find something that would tell her when she had passed by before, when she recognizes the front of her uncle's precinct.

That was both elevating and a bit alarming. It had, after all, been at least a thirty minute drive from the precinct to her uncle's apartment, and then a twenty minute drive to her grandmother's. She debates going in to ask Don directions, but he would undoubtedly drop was he was doing and drive her home, and she didn't want to bother him. But her grandmother was probably worrying; after all, it had been hours since she left for the park that was only a few blocks away. After a moment of debating, a familiar face smiles brightly at her through the glass panels on the doors of the precinct and beckons her inside.

A minute earlier, Danny had been forced to let Alexander Andropov go because, despite a mile-long list of circumstantial evidence, they had nothing solid to tie him to the murder of a rival Russian mob leader from the previous night. The crime boss walks towards the station doors – without, much to Danny's chagrin, handcuffs – but pauses half a dozen steps from freedom, as Anna comes gliding inside.

The girl runs towards the older man and all but leaps into his arms in a grand hug, and then kisses both his cheeks. They begin to talk animatedly in Russian while Danny watches, eye narrowed, from across the squad room. Andropov keeps an almost protective hand on Anna's arm, while Anna touches his shoulder every few seconds; they act as if they've known each other for years.

After what had to have been ten minutes, the two hug again, and then Andropov continues his tormentingly unobstructed waltz to freedom. Danny waits for the man to exit the building before approaching Anna.

"Hey, what's your name?" he asks her.

"Anna Nabieva. And you?"

"I'm Detective Messer. What are you here for?"

"I was just passing by." She looks around the room for her uncle, to explain why she paused in front of the building in the first place, but cannot see him. "I was at the park, and then – well, you see, my uncle…" She cannot think of a concise way to explain how she ended up blocks and blocks from her desired destination, and does not want to waste the detective's time, so she simply smiles at him.

Had Danny gotten more than two hours of sleep the night before (which made, for the record, a total of six for the week) his brain might have been a little quicker draw connections. Connections between things like, for example, the fact that, mere weeks after his best friend's Russian niece named Anna move to America, a girl named Anna with a thick Slavic accent shows up at the precinct talking, if inarticulately, about her uncle.

But, as it were, he simply asks the girl to come with him into an interrogation room, and Anna, drawing from experience with the _do as they say or eat a bullet _breed of cops, obliges without another word.

Police officers had always instilled fear in Anna. Whenever they appeared, bad things happened. Walking into a building full of them was about as taboo as it gets where she was from, and, once Andropov had left and she had realized where she was, she was instantly off-put. She felt more at home with the groups of people being led around in handcuffs than with the detectives, a feeling that she had battled the entire time she had sat down behind enemy lines in response to her uncle's death threat. And now, in the dimly lit interrogation room, her legs were shaking, and an army of goose bumps had pushed themselves up onto her skin.

However, if her mother taught her one thing, it was to never show weakness to law enforcement, so she puts on the biggest of smiles and waits for Detective Messer to start his questions.

"That man you were just talking to, do you know him?"

"Mr. Andropov? Of course. He was a friend of my mother."

"Your mother knows him?"

_Knew him_, Anna thinks. _Past tense._ In this language, they talk about dead people in the past tense, she is almost certain. But, for all she knew, one of those colloquialistic rules that no one could explain very well pardoned the man in front of her, so she does not correct him, instead simply nodding.

"How long have you known him?"

"Since I was very little. My mother was friends with him before I was born; I believe I met him when I was six weeks old."

"Okay, so he's an old family friend?" Danny's tone becomes conversational.

Anna recognizes the good-cop/bad-cop trick, boiled down to fit into a singular interviewer, and does not allow herself to lower her guard. "I would call that a fair assessment, yes."

"What were you two talking about?"

_Nothing of interest to you, surely_. "We were talking about how we each ended up in New York, as both of us are originally from Russia."

"And how is it that you ended up in New York?"

"My mother died. I came to live with my uncle, here."

This causes a glimmer of recognition in Danny, but he's _in the zone_, has a rhythm going with the questions, and ignores it.

"Your mother, who was friends with Andropov? She died?

"Yes, sir." _My one and only mother_.

"I am very sorry for your loss."

"Thank you."

He pauses a moment, staring at the ceiling, and Anna studies his face. She notes the bags under his eyes, the small stain on his unironed shirt, his ragged, broken nails. He exudes an exhaustion so intense that it nearly infects Anna from across the menacingly barren metal table, but somehow still manages to maintain a threatening presence.

"Were you with Andropov last night?"

"No, sir. I haven't seen him since I came to this country."

"And when was that?"

Anna counts back in her head. "Twenty-three days."

"Twenty-three days, exactly?"

She recounts, and then nods. "Yes, sir."

"And you haven't seen Andropov in all that time?"

"Truthfully, sir, I haven't seen him for at least two months."

"You didn't know he had come to America?"

"No, sir."

"I thought you were good friends with him?"

It could be a result of the language barrier, but Anna could swear she hears a hint of triumph in his voice, as if not knowing the exact location of a family friend was a criminal act.

"He was friends with my mother, sir. But he is a very busy man. I rarely saw him more than once every few weeks. I know he travels often, for business. He does not keep me updated on his whereabouts, and when I do see him, there are other things to do than talk about his travel plans, which more often than not are decided by business trips – mundane, really."

"Do you know what his 'business' is?"

"Mr. Andropov does many things. I believe his alcohol company is his most lucrative pursuit – they distill beer, vodka, all manner of drinks – but I could be wrong. I do not ask for any specifics about his money, sir; it is rude."

"Anna, how did your mother meet this guy? Did she work with him? For him?"

"Like I said, Mr. Messer-"

"Detective."

She looks at him for a moment, perplexed. He does not break the eye contact, and he realizes what has been bugging him about her face: her irises are as red as her hair.

"Like I said, _Detective_," she begins again, "my mother met Mr. Andropov before I was born. I never did ask her how they met. I suppose whenever he came around, other things were on my mind."

Danny pauses again to think, and Anna sighs.

"Detective, my grandmother does not know I'm here. She's probably worried. I just wanted to ask my uncle for directions. May I go now?"

"What is your uncle doing right now?"

"I do not know. He works here. I am lost; I was hoping he could tell me how to get back home. I didn't want to cause any trouble."

Things finally begin to click inside Danny's sleep deprived brain.

"What did you say your uncle's name was?"

"I never told you my uncle's name, _sir_." The last word comes out biting, somehow an insult mixed with deference. "You did not ask for it."

"Well, I'm asking for it now."

"Don Flack."

Danny rubs his eyes. It was going to be a long day.


	8. Chapter 8

Sitting in the interrogation room with her uncle was only slightly less disconcerting than sitting there with the other detective. He was sitting across the table, arms crossed, a look of frustration darkening his handsome features. Memories came flooding back through Anna's head of big men in ominous suits claiming to be trying to help her and her siblings while looking for any excuse to tear her family apart and throw her into a foster home where she'd be lucky to avoid a rapist for a father.

"Start from the beginning, Anna. How do you know Andropov?"

Don hadn't heard of this guy until Danny came rushing out of interrogation with a look of such shock that Don's mind immediately began running through lists of bad things that could have happened to Louis. But no, the youngest Messer child was fine. It was the Flack family that was, once again, causing the uproar. Apparently, Andropov had appeared on the New York mob scene a few weeks ago, and was already playing with the big boys, as the murder last night had shown. And he'd barely washed his hands of the man's blood before buddying up with Anna.

"As I told Detective Messer, he was a friend of my mother."

"How did she know him?"

She shrugs. "They were old friends."

"Okay, Anna, but how did they _meet_? Did they do business together? Did she work for him?"

Anna shakes her head.

"Did he get her drugs? Is that how they knew each other?"

"Mr. Andropov does not sell drugs, to my knowledge."

"Then where did their paths ever cross?"

Anna pauses, mouth slightly open, as if trying to decide what to say. The silence is endless, a cavern ready to swallow what little relationship Don had with his niece. He is about to break the cardinal rule of interrogation, about to break the silence, about to get beg for her not to hate him, about to backpedal so fast he'd end up in high school, refusing to let Svetlana on that Russia-bound plane with his brother's child growing in her belly, when Anna speaks. Her voice, normally confident, has become soft, as if muffled behind a wall of a thousand stifled emotions. "The way my brothers tell it – and be warned, I do not know how much is true – Mr. Andropov found my mother lying unconscious in an alley one night. Her, ah, how you say, 'dealer' had beaten her very badly. Mr. Andropov took her to the hospital, and then came to our house to watch my brothers, who were at that time two and three, while my mother recovered. He would come by every so often after that to check up my siblings and me."

Don does not speak for a moment. What could he say? What kind of leverage did he hold over Andropov, the man that was there for Anna when he, Don, was not?

"Do you know that he is a very bad man?"

A quiet kind of rage festers in Anna's stomach. "You cannot say that. I'm sure you can say many things about Mr. Andropov, but you cannot simply say that he is a" – she uses air quotes – "'bad man'." Her voice begins to shake. "You cannot tell me that the man who convinced the government to provide my mother with a house so we weren't living in boxes on the street, the man who came to us with groceries and clothes and school supplies when my mother had spent the last ruble she had to her name on heroin, the man who spent hours on the phone with the electricity company and the water company to make sure that we didn't die of thirst or freeze to death when my mother forgot to pay the bills – you cannot tell me that that man is a 'bad man'." She sucks in a deep breath, and stops her slowly crescendoing monologue before she begins to shout.

Don is hit full force with the image of his niece, along with nine brothers and sisters, huddled in a dark corner of some small, dilapidated house in the middle of nowhere, covered in rags that wouldn't keep out the omnipresent, cruel Russian cold, starving for food, waiting for the one person on the planet who cared about them to come through the door and save them. How could he express to her how terrible this man really was? How could he break through her armor of admiration and show her all the men that _he _had put in alleys, unconscious and bleeding and left for dead? How could he get her to internalize the countless laws the man had broken, the dozens, hundreds, probably, of coffins the man had personally filled?

"Anna…"

"Your father was a police officer, yes?" Her voice has softened.

"Yes."

"You must have grown up with such clear views of right and wrong, as defined by your government, your courts, your Constitution. From your earliest moment of existence it was the good guys against the bad guys, and you knew so well who was whom. Everything was perfectly black and white. But where I am from, that philosophy falls apart. The 'good guys' come and beat your neighbors and bust down your doors and try to take you from your family. The 'bad guys' aren't saints, not most of them, but at least they'll leave you be if you keep your head down. And the police, they wear their badges like some sort of invincible shield; they do what they want to us and no one ever tells them not to. The criminals, at least they have their own sort of honor code. They don't come into your house, guns ready, because you didn't pay your taxes and that got them a search warrant. They-"

It is a truly moving speech, the kind that makes you go home and question just about every decision you've ever made, from your career choice to what restaurant you last had dinner at. But it stops short, its orator, mouth hanging open mid-poignant-word, staring wide eyed at the door to the interrogation room.

Don has to turn in his seat to see Petrov, the liaison to the Russian police that was helping Danny with the Andropov case, as well as, it happened, Jamie's new violinist neighbor, standing in the doorway. By the time he registered the man's rather unsightly features, a piercing scream rocks the entire floor.

Don's niece is a flash of pale skin and red hair pushing past Petrov into the bullpen. She deftly makes her way through the maze of desks to the front doors. Every person within spitting distance of her, well-versed in the kinds of people who run from interrogation room, makes a grab at her, but she avoids them all easily, and, for some inexplicable reason, the phrase _float like a butterfly, sting like a bee_ comes to Don's mind.

Finally, Mac manages to get a hand around her lithe arm, but her momentum nearly pulls them both down. She hasn't stopped screaming, hasn't even paused for a breath, and, as Don begins to wonder where in her flat stomach she's holding all this air, her shrieks evolve into sobs. She stops resisting Mac's hold, instead falling into him, pressing herself against his body in an effort to stay as far away from Petrov as possible. Danny, who'd emerged from the viewing room just in time to witness the odd embrace, narrows his eyes. Yes, it would be quite a long day.


	9. Chapter 9

Anna is curled in a rough wool blanket from one of the holding cells. Once Mac had peeled himself off her, he dragged her back to the interrogation room, but she wouldn't speak. She had cried quietly for a while before becoming entirely silent, staring at the one-way mirror blindly. After about an hour, Mac had decided to take the interrogation over, kicking Danny and Don out. He'd tried every trick in the book, from whispering gently to kicking over chairs. Anna didn't open her mouth. He even – for some mysterious reason – thought bringing Petrov into the interrogation room might help. Anna had immediately started screaming in Russian, a look of pure hatred on her face, until Petrov backed out.

Now Mac is trying the leave-'em-be method. Normally it takes less than ninety minutes alone in a small steel room for guilt or anxiety to overcome a subject. But Anna has gone two hours without a problem and didn't seem to be caving anytime soon. Danny and Don sit in the viewing room, both hunched over in concentration.

"She's gotta get hungry eventually. Or at least need the goddamn bathroom," Danny mutters.

"Danny, there's no way. She doesn't know anything."

"Not about the murder, maybe, but she sure knows something about Andropov. And what the hell was that freak out about Petrov?"

"You got as much of a clue as I do. How much do you know about the guy?"

"Petrov? Only that he's with the Moscow police."

"You know what they say about Russian cops."

"We've all heard the horror stories, yeah. But come on – would they make those scumbags liaisons with the NYPD?"

"Well, he did something to make Anna scream like that. You heard her."

"I'm pretty sure my grandpop heard her from Ocean View."

Don sighs and rubs his eyes. He could swear his niece is looking directly at him, despite the fact that there is no possible way she can see him. He could feel fear and anger radiating through the glass.

The door opens. Danny and Don turn to see Mac walk in, followed by Petrov. As soon as the last man is through the door, Mac slams it shut and turns to the group.

"Alright. Who wants to tell me what the hell is going on?"

Don shakes his hand. "You know as much as Danny and I do, Mac."

Mac turns to Petrov. "And you?"

Petrov shrugs. "I know nothing." He is short, with an accent was a level thicker than Anna's. He dresses as if he hasn't bought any clothes in the past decade and Don was pretty sure he had seen the guy slip some vodka into his morning coffee, but he came off as a generally decent man.

"What do you mean you know nothing? A sixteen-year-old girl took one look at you and just about died, and you know _nothing_? How do you know her, Petrov? When did you two meet? Tell me _something_."

Petrov looks at Mac through narrowed eyes for a moment. "I used to work as a police officer in the town where she lived. Why she screams, I do not know."

"So you were a cop in her town. What, were you a crossing guard? How the hell did you meet a little girl?"

Petrov grimaces. "Her mother… eh, she was not a good woman."

"What does that mean?"

"She – how you say – had many _run ins_ with the law."

"And you met Anna through her mom's criminal activity?"

"Yes."

"Jesus." Mac throws his hands in the air. "It's like interrogating a fucking witness. Did you remove her from the house? Did she come down to the station? Did you question her about her mom? What?"

"It was never an official meeting. We just… ran into each other."

"What the hell does that mean?" Mac steps forward, so he is inches away from Petrov. "There is a reason that child started screaming bloody murder when you walked in, and it's not been you two occasionally ran into each other in the goddamn grocery store."

"The screaming, I know nothing about that."

"You know nothing. Fine. Perfect. That's fucking perfect."

"Mac." Don refuses look away from his bosses' piercing store. "You got to let her go. She's a kid, Mac. Look at her." They all glance through the glass as the redhead, who looked like she had been awake for years. "She's exhausted. She's terrified of – of _something_." Don hesitated to condemn Petrov. "She's not talking, no way. She's lasted this long, she'll last forever. Plus, we have nothing to hold her on."

"Andropov is out there right now, Don. He's already put one body in the morgue. Who knows what he'll do next?"

"He put a Russian mobster in the morgue, Mac. The Russian mob's been in this city since it was founded. The bosses rise up by shooting people and then they get shot. It's been going on since before you or I were born and it will keep going on long after we're gone. Keeping Anna here isn't going to fix that."

Mac sighs and puts his head in his hands. "Fine, we'll release her. But make sure she doesn't skip town."

"She's not going anywhere, don't worry."

* * *

><p>Gran is out playing bridge when Anna is officially released, so Don drives her to his apartment. She is completely silent on the ride home, refusing to respond to any of Don's attempts at pleasant conversation. Once in the apartment, she sits on the sofa numbly, balling her hands into fists and then releasing them.<p>

Don sits down next to her and puts his hand on her shoulder. "Anna?"

She keeps her eyes on the floor, but they flicker a bit.

"Anna, please."

Now she looks at him, eyes red and swollen. "I thought he was gone. I thought I would never see him again, not after I came here."

"What happened?"

She takes a ragged breath. "I can't – it's not – I don't want to talk about it."

"Anna, listen. There are a lot of people right now who are very concerned about you and Andropov and Petrov, okay? I need to know what's going on."

She looks as if she won't respond.

"Please, Anna. I can't help you if you don't talk to me."

Anna smiles, but her eyes are dead. "Uncle Don, I don't think you can help me either way."

"Try me."

The following silence is deafening, but Anna eventually begins speaking, pausing periodically to swallow hard or hold back tears.

"My mother – oh, my mother. There is too much to say about her. But, to keep it short – to finance her, you know, addiction, she became… a prostitute. And, of course, being a prostitute is illegal in Russia, as it is here. Petrov, back when he was one of those police officers who just walk around at night and, I don't know, make sure people aren't being prostitutes, I guess, he found her… soliciting someone. The punishment for being a prostitute should have only been a fine, but Petrov told my mother that he would make it look like she had been… organizing a whole ring of prostitutes – which she hadn't, if that makes it any better. And so my mom begged him to make a deal, anything to keep her out of prison – as, how you say, _pimping _is a crime worthy of jail-time in Russia. And so…" She bites her lip. "He asked her if she had any children – any daughters. And the rest… I do not wish to say it."

"Oh my God, Anna." Don hugs her to his chest as she begins to cry. "How long did it go on?"

"It started… when I… was eight…" she manages between sobs. "And then… until I… came here."

Don waits, feeling his niece rock with sadness. "What about Andropov?"

She jerks away from him, venom in her glare. "What about him?"

"Did he…"

"No. Never."

"Did he know about it?"

"No. He would have killed him. Instantly."

"Why didn't you tell anyone?"

"Who? No one would have done anything. The police wouldn't have cared. Mr. Andropov, of course. But what would killing Petrov have done? At least he was a, how you say, a known quantity. He, ah, he _protected_" – she looked as if the word disgusted her – "my mother. From the other police, you know, who might have caught her and wanted to strike up their own deals. There are some very, very bad police in Russia, Uncle Don. Petrov… he seemed manageable. A necessary evil. All those years… I-" She looks up at the ceiling, willing herself not to start crying again. "I got to know him. I convinced him never to touch any of my sisters." She turns to him again, a tragic smile on her face. "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Or the one."

Don has no words, so he simply grasps her hand.

"What is he doing here? When will he leave?"

"I don't know, Anna. He's supposed to help us catch Andropov-"

"No. The Russian police, they do not care about the mob. Not in Russia, so certainly not in New York. Half of the detectives in Krasnokamsk – more, probably – were making more from Andropov's bribes than from their own government salaries. Petrov doesn't care about catching anyone."

"Well, that's what he tells people he's here for."

"You cannot tell anyone. No one. What I told you, you can't repeat it."

"Anna-"

"Promise me. Promise me you will not tell anyone."

"Look, Anna. You were in a police precinct today. You caused a commotion loud enough for them to hear you across the street. People need answers. There's no way I can do anything about Petrov if-"

"You can't do anything about him, period. You don't – it's not you're jurisdiction, what he did to me in Russia. All you could possibly do is have him deported – back to Krasnokamsk. My two brothers, and my sister, they're still there. I can't have him humiliated because of me and then sent back to my siblings. Think about what he could do to them." She squeezes his hand. "My sister, she is only eight. What happened to me… I would not wish that on anyone."

"Anna, I can't just let this go."

"Please, Uncle Don. Promise me you won't tell anyone."

He looks at her disturbingly red eyes, and then nods. "I promise – for now."

She sighs in relief. "Thank you."


	10. Chapter 10

Don looks over at his girlfriend and puts his hand on her thigh. She is staring out the window blankly, but turns to meet his gaze. Her eyes are flanked by grey half-moons; she had tossed and turned in his bed the entire night before.

The tipping point had been yesterday, around eight in the evening. Isabelle called in tears; she had burned Martin's toast and then dropped a plate, shattering it across their small kitchen, and he had threatened her with a knife. She waited for two hours, until he went to out for a drink, to call.

"Come stay with me, Isabelle. Please," Jamie begged on the phone.

"How will I leave? He'll kill me if he finds me packing our things, Jamie. I know he will."

"Wait until he leaves for work tomorrow. Don and I will come over and help you. It will all be fine, Isabelle. Don't worry."

They are police officers, she kept reminding herself. They can do this.

The first forty minutes go smoothly. Don parks behind the building so that his car isn't visible from the street. Sam comes over and takes Maria and Hailey to her apartment, just in case. Jamie helps Isabelle shove clothes, shoes, baby supplies into duffle bags: only the essentials. Leave the towels, I have extra. We can pick up crayons at the drugstore, they're not important. We only have time to get a few pictures; quickly, pick your favorites. Don stands watch at the door.

As Jamie and Isabelle try to figure out how to dissemble Hailey's crib, they hear heavy footsteps coming down the hall. Both women stop moving. Isabelle is paused almost comically, one hand trying to pull two boards apart, the other pressed against her temple in concentration. Her lips begin to tremble when the apartment door opens.

"Qué demonios-"

"Martin." Don's voice, calm and even, echoes slightly into Isabelle's bedroom.

"What are you doing here, Don?"

"I-"

"Where's Isabelle? Isabelle!"

"Martin, I think you should go."

"You think _I _should go? This is _my_ house. Get _out_."

A thud comes from the living room, and Jamie gestures to her sister-in-law to stay quiet. By the time she's out of the bedroom, Don has Martin in a headlock.

"Listen, buddy. You touch me, that's assault on a cop, got it? That's minimum-"

Martin manages to break out of Don's hold and punches him in the face. Don twists him around and shoves him against the wall before putting him in handcuffs. Isabelle emerges from the bedroom in tears. Jamie wraps her in a hug as Martin curses as Don in Spanish. Jamie gets a look at her boyfriend's face as he leads her brother out; blood covers the skin between his nose and upper lip.

* * *

><p>"How long will he get?" Isabelle asks as she finishes tucking in the corner of Jamie's extra set of bed sheets into the guest bed.<p>

Hailey is sitting in the crib, which was remarkably easier to assemble than to take apart, in the corner. Maria is humming away at the breakfast counter, coloring with some brand-new crayons. Jamie is standing in the doorway of her spare room, holding a pile of blankets. She sighs.

"Third degree assault on a police officer… Could get bumped up, depending on the way Don plays it – or bumped down if Martin makes a deal, which he'll probably want to do… I'm thinking a year."

"A year in jail?"

"That's just my estimate."

Isabelle nods as she helps Jamie spread the blankets on the bed. "Hailey will be walking. Maria will be finished kindergarten." She sits down on the corner of the bed and rests her chin in her hands. "What am I going to do, Jamie? I haven't worked in six years."

Jamie sits down and puts her arm around her sister-in-law. "You'll figure something out, Isabelle. And you can stay here as long as you want. It will all be fine."

The following silence is broken by a knock on the front door. Isabelle gasps, eyes widening, but Jamie shakes her head. "It's not him. He's in jail. It's okay."

Jamie leaves Isabelle in the guestroom. She pats her niece on the back as she passes her, but Maria barely glances up from her drawing. Jamie could only guess how long it had been since the girl had been given new crayons.

By the time she reaches the door, another knock rings out. Jamie smiles slightly to herself, recognizing her own impatience. She averages three knocks at Don's apartment before he makes it the door.

She finds Petrov standing in the doorway. He is dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt – his normal weekend attire, as far as Jamie had gathered from the times she had passed him in the lobby of their building. Jamie stepped forward a bit when she recognized him, trying to block his view of Maria. She hadn't been able to get any details out of her boyfriend about the incident with Anna two weeks ago, but had been uneasy about her new neighbor ever since.

"Detective Lovato," he opens with a smile.

"Petrov. What can I do for you?"

"I saw some people moving in. A roommate?"

"My-" Jamie starts, but then stops. She knew her brother was in jail, but experience told her that the less people who knew where a domestic violence victim was, the better. "My friend, Isabelle. She's staying with me for a little while."

"A little while?"

Jamie nods, refusing to elaborate.

"May I introduce myself?" He leans forward, trying to see past Jamie into the apartment.

"Thank you for being so friendly, but it's been a long day. I think she'd really just like to rest."

"Some other time, then?"

"Maybe some other time."

He makes one last attempt to see inside Jamie's living room, but she thinks she is effectively blocking his view.

"I'll see you Monday, then."

"See you Monday."

* * *

><p>On Monday, Don came into the precinct a minute later than Jamie. She got a good look at his nose, which was still slightly swollen two days after the fact and developing a substantial bruise. She went over to him when he got settled and sat down on the edge of his desk.<p>

"You don't look so hot," she tells him after a moment of silence.

"Well, I have to hand it to you, Lovato, your brother can hit." Don registers his girlfriend's frown and softens his tone. "How are Isabelle and the kids?"

"Adjusting. Hailey's as happy as can be, but she probably doesn't even realize… Isabelle, on the other hand, jumps every time the floors creak, the poor thing. But Maria's all excited to start kindergarten next week, so that's good, I guess."

"Yeah, Anna starts school this Thursday."

"What's up with starting the high schools in the middle of the week? They never did that when I was growing up."

"Some bureaucratic craziness, I'm sure."

Petrov passes by Don's desk, holding his daily coffee and the same worn leather briefcase as usual. Don stares at him with thinly veiled hatred.

"He came by on Saturday right after you left," Jamie whispers, gesturing discreetly with her shoulder. Don perks up slightly.

"What did he want?"

"He saw us moving Isabelle in and wanted to introduce himself."

"What'd you tell him?"

"That she was a friend staying for a little while. He seemed to want details, but he didn't really push for them. You're okay keeping this whole situation quiet, right?"

"Of course. Did he meet Isabelle?"

"No, I said she wanted to rest."

Don nods his approval. "Well, they're your family, Jamie. But if I were you, I would keep those kids as far away from him as possible."

"Why do you say that?"

Don shakes his head. "I can't say, Jamie. But trust me: you do not want to mess with this guy."

* * *

><p>After that, Jamie could have sworn she saw Petrov more often outside of work. He was ubiquitous – he returned from dinner at the exact moment she left to pick up take-out; he always managed to be waiting for the same elevator as she; he just happened into the laundry room when she was there. He almost always asked about Isabelle. Soon enough, he mentioned that he had heard an infant crying. Jamie couldn't deny Hailey's existent altogether, but, in response to Don's warning, she tried to remain cryptic about the girl's gender. She referred to Hailey only as "the baby" or "Isabelle's baby" – and only in response to Petrov's ever-present questions.<p>

She convinced herself that she was being paranoid. He lived across the hall from her, for God's sake; they were going to run into each other every so often. And the questions: he probably didn't know many people in the area and was just trying to make friends.

One day, in the laundry room, he slips in seconds after she arrived, carrying a hamper full of jeans.

"Detective Lovato, what a lovely surprise."

"Good morning, Petrov."

"Good morning. How are you today?"

"I'm well. And yourself?"

"Fine, thank you. How are your guest and her children?"

Jamie tries to hide her shock. Petrov had never before asked about Maria; Jamie had been trying, in fact, to keep him from finding out that Isabelle had more than one kid.

"They're good."

"I was thinking, what if you all came to my apartment for dinner sometime? Perhaps next week?"

"That's very kind of you, but Isabelle hasn't been feeling well. And the baby – you know how it is. Now's really just not a good time."

When she finishes putting her wet clothes in the dryer and turns to face him, she realizes he has gotten so close to her as to corner her in between the washing machines and the wall. Her heartbeat quickens slightly.

"Now, Detective Lovato, I am beginning to think you are avoiding me."

"Why do you say that?"

"I feel that I've made many attempts at pleasant conversation, and you seem to try to end our chats as quickly as you can."

"I'm sorry if you feel I've been clipped, Petrov. Really, this-" she makes a circle with her hand, encompassing the small space between her and her neighbor "-is normal American interaction. If you'd like, I would happily have dinner with you. I'll even invite Detective Flack, maybe some others from the precinct – it will be a party. It's just that Isabelle is so busy with the baby; I don't think she's interested in going out very much."

"Oh really? She stays cooped up in that apartment of yours all day, and wouldn't even enjoy one night out – _across the hall_, that is?"

Jamie scoffs, doing her best to hide her suspicion. "Obviously, Petrov, you've never had children. Isabelle sleeps every spare second she has; the baby keeps her up all night."

Petrov narrows his eyes, and then turns quickly. He calls out a short good-bye as he exits the room. It is only later, as she's folding her newly-dry clothes, that Jamie realizes he never washed anything.


	11. Chapter 11

For the first five minutes after the final bell of the day, it seems as if the high school's population is endless. It is a mass exodus; students have to fight their way out of the double doors. The sheer number of kids is baffling. Don can't imagine how they all manage to fit in the small school building. His niece is, apparently, nowhere to be found among the masses.

It was only the fourth day of the school year – which happened to fall on a Tuesday, because some genius high up on the school board decided to start the year on a Thursday – but, according to Gran, Anna was adjusting well. She seemed to understand her classes well enough, and was already going on about all the clubs she wanted to join.

_"__She wants to join a woodwork club, Donny. Can you imagine? Pretty girl like her, around all those boys…"_

_ "__I love you, Gran, but it's been a while since you went to high school. I'm sure there are some girls in the woodwork club."_

_ "__She says she wants to make a set of wooden coasters. I told her I already had coasters. She said she would make an extra set in case mine ever broke. I don't know what I'm going to do with that girl. Coasters don't just _break_."_

Don laughs, remembering the conversation over the phone. He had resisted seeing his grandmother – and his sister, for that matter – over the past week and a half, because his face was still beaten up. He had somehow managed to avoid a broken nose, but he didn't look pretty. When Gran had asked him to pick up Anna from school, he had checked himself in the mirror; he looked decently presentable. Jamie had offered to show him how to use foundation to cover the bruise, but he had shrugged her off. His father had taught him to wear injuries from convicts as badges of honor.

Finally, eleven minutes after school had officially ended, just as Don starts to worry, Anna appears in the doorway of the building. She is talking animatedly with a tale, dark-haired boy. Even from across the street, Don recognizes that he is handsome. He is tan, with wiry muscles and an amazingly chiseled jaw line, considering he couldn't be much older than sixteen and still be in Anna's school. The pair together look like one of those celebrity model couples.

They kiss on the cheek and then part ways. Anna looks as if she's about to go down the street until she sees her uncle's car and comes over.

"Uncle Don! How are you?" she says as soon as she gets into the passenger seat.

"I'm good-"

"_Bozhe moy_, what happened to your nose?" she interrupts, a look of concern mixed with shock on her face.

Don self-consciously brings his hand up, pressing it gently on the bruised area. He didn't think it was that conspicuous. His nose was now mostly a dark yellow, except for spots of brown on the left edge where Martin's hand had come down hardest.

"Nothing – just something at work. Someone I was arresting got out of hand."

"Does it hurt?"

"Not much anymore. Really, don't worry about me. Tell me how your day was," he insists as he pulls into the traffic.

Anna looks at him silently for a minute longer, and then decides to stop questioning his bruises.

"Oh, school here is so different from my old school."

"Good different or bad different?"

She shrugs. "Neutrally different, I guess. Oh-" – her tone becomes indignant – "-but the school is making me take Russian."

"They're making you take Russian? Don't they know you already speak it?"

"Yes, that's what I told them. I met with the principal about it today. She said that students are required to take a second language, and because English was already my second language, and all foreign language classes – they offer French, Spanish, Latin, German, Mandarin, and Russian – are based in English, she didn't think I should be learning a third language through my second language." She takes a deep, slightly exasperated breath. "So much English. Anyway, I asked if I could just take the final exam for the highest level of Russian and get a credit that way, but she said it didn't work like that. So now I'm in Russian Level Five."

"Is that the highest level?"

"Yes."

"Well that should be an easy class for you, at least, right?"

She nods but wrinkles her nose in dissent.

"Why are you making that face?"

"Well, my Russian teacher seems like a, how you say, _sweetheart_, but she's not a native speaker. She's from Brooklyn – which, I learned yesterday, is in New York and not Germany" – Don snorts slightly at that – "so she has a New York accent, and whoever taught her Russian must have had some sort of, how you say, _non-native_ accent as well, so her Russian sounds mostly like, eh, _gibberish_ to me. And she can't understand me much, either. Except when I write. I know how to spell everything correctly, certainly."

"That's unfortunate."

She shrugs again. "I'm sure I will learn how to understand her accent. Oh-" – she brings her hand to her mouth as if she's just realized something – "I hope I do not acquire her accent. That would be odd, someone who speaks English with a Russian accent, speaking Russian with a New York, eh… _hybrid_ accent." She smiles when she finds the right word. "I will have to find some Russian people to talk to."

Don tries to change the subject, to keep the conversation from straying to Andropov and Petrov. "What about your other classes? How do you like those?"

"I like them. Most of my teachers seem nice."

"That boy you were just talking to, is he in any of your classes?"

"Jace? Yes. He is in my math class and my history class. And he has the same lunch period as I."

"Mmm." Don doesn't press for details on the status of their relationship. "I hear you're thinking of joining some clubs?"

"Yes! There are so many clubs that I want to join."

"Like Woodworking?"

"Yes! And Art Club, Sewing Club, Cards Club, Basket-Weaving – there's a _basket-weaving _club. I don't think there's a single basket-weaving club in the entire country of Russia."

Don can only laugh at her sincerity.

"Also someone suggested I try out for the football – ah, soccer – team. The try-outs were a few weeks ago, but she said that they sometimes make exceptions for new students."

"You said you played soccer back in Russia, right?"

"Yes. Never for school, though. I could not, because of dance."

"Did you dance a lot?"

"Oh, yes, all the time."

"If you want, we could look for a dance studio around here?"

Don's focused on the road, as he's trying to navigate a particularly crowded intersection, but he thinks he sees Anna smile out of the corner of his eye.

"No. I think it is time to give it up."

It strikes Don as an odd response, but he is concentrating too hard on driving to really process it.

"So, soccer."

"Yes."

"What position do you play?"

"Oh, you are going to a place where my English is not going to be very good," she says, laughing. "I mostly play on the right… ah… the one who wants the ball, not the one who always kicks the ball away?"

"Offense? Do you shoot the ball at the goal?"

"Yes! Offense."

"And the people who stop the ball, they're called defense."

"Defense and offense. This wouldn't relate to the fences one has around their house, would it?"

Don chuckles. "No. That's fence, F-E-N-C-E. This is fense, F-E-N-S-E."

"What does F-E-N-S-E mean?"

"Nothing by itself, I don't think. It just combines to make offense or defense." Don makes a mental note to Google the etymology when he gets home. "And the people in between the offense and defense, they're called midfielders."

"Midfielders. They're in the middle of the field. That makes sense."

Don wants to continue – he knows enough about soccer from high school gym class to go on for a while – but he worries he's drowning his niece in foreign words.

"So how are you going to try out?"

"I have to contact Coach White and ask to be considered for late admission. Christina told me where to find her before school."

"Christina?"

"She sits next to me in math"

"I thought Jace sat next to you in math?"

"No, he sits across from me."

"Oh."

Anna stares out the window wordlessly for a moment, and then: "How is Jamie?"

The change in topic catches Don off-guard. "She's – fine," he stumbles, too aware of his need to keep the situation with Isabelle quiet.

"Yes?" Anna says it innocently, but Don senses she caught his lie.

"Yeah. Busy working, you know how it is." _No, she doesn't know how it is. She's not a police officer. She's a sixteen-year-old girl. _"She's thinking of getting a new cat." _No, she's not_. "And her niece is just starting kindergarten, so that's fun." _Great, talk about the one thing you're not supposed to bring up._

Don considers himself to be a pretty self-possessed liar, for the most part, but something about Anna made him fumble. It couldn't be her striking hair or piercing gaze; he wasn't even looking at her. It was something more fundamental. She simply exuded a sort of innocence and genuineness.

Anna doesn't respond for a moment, obviously befuddled by her uncle's guilty rambling. She doesn't ask, though, God bless her.

"Mmm," is all she replies.

They ride for ten minutes in silence, before Don speaks up.

"Do you need to get home right away?"

He glances at his niece, and sees confusion cross her face.

"I don't understand – right _away_?"

"You've never heard that phrase before?"

"No."

"It just means, like, right now. Right this second."

"Do I need to get home right now?"

"Yes."

"I – no. I don't think I do, but I…"

He looks at her again, and she simply shakes her head, feeling like she has missed some nuance.

"Mac – my boss – would like to talk to you."

"Ah. About Mr. Andropov?"

"Yes. Would that be okay?"

"Sure." Don thinks he sees her smile slightly, though it was gone so quickly, it could have been more of a grimace.


	12. Chapter 12

Anna sits across a cheap steal table from Danny and Mac. She is not handcuffed, which she takes as a good sign. Her uncle is nowhere to be found. Before he left her in the interrogation room, he told her he wasn't allowed to have any contact with the case.

The case. The murder of some Russian criminal. Anna wonders who the dead man was, how he had fallen into his dangerous life, if he had a family, if his business partners missed him. She is sure the two detectives across from her were not thinking of the same things.

"Anna Nabieva," Mac reads from a manila folder. "Sixteen years old. Born in Krasnokamsk, Russia."Anna doesn't correct his mispronunciation of her name or her hometown. "Daughter of Patrick Flack and Svetlana Nabieva. But you took your mother's last name, as did each of your nine siblings." There is some sort of accusation in there, but Anna doesn't respond. "No criminal record – though your mother certainly had one."

He looks up from the papers in front of him for the first time. Anna guesses that she's supposed to break under the weight of two police officers' dark stares, but she is unperturbed. This is America; they can't shoot you for not doing as they wish.

"Tell us about your relationship with Alexander Andropov."

"Sir, I'm not sure if you are expecting me to say something different than I did the last time we spoke. If you are, you will certainly be disappointed. If you aren't, you seem to be wasting your time, yes?"

Mac bristles under the implied insult. Danny speaks up.

"Look, Anna, we're just looking for some more details. You know, start from the beginning, and all that."

Anna sighs. "Mr. Andropov knew my mother for a long time. He, how you say, _looked_ _out_ for her. Her tendency to endanger herself and her children by looking for heroin wasn't exactly a secret, so he made sure we had a house to stay in, food to eat, school supplies, things like that."

"You mentioned that to your uncle. He was your guardian angel. A real good Samaritan, that one," Mac mutters.

Anna cocks her head slightly. "Guardian angel? Samaritan?"

"Don't worry about it." Danny waves his hand dismissively. "He kept you safe."

Anna still looks confused, but then shakes her head. Mac and Danny expect her to continue, but she doesn't.

"How often did you see him?"

"Every few weeks."

"Did you ever talk to him about his job?"

"His alcohol distilleries came up every so often, yes."

Mac digs through his papers. "Yes, twenty distilleries, mostly in Russia, but some across the rest of Europe as well." Anna nods. "But that's not the job we were referring to."

The girl gives them a blank look.

"He practically runs the Perm Krai region of the Russian mob, Anna."

"Ah," she says. "That job."

"Yes," Mac bites. "_That _job."

"Listen, detectives, I knew that Mr. Andropov was most likely involved in more than liquor. Most wealthy people are, where I am from. I don't know much. You probably know more about his work than I do."

"Let me show you some of his work," Mac says, and tosses a full-page photograph of the body Andropov sent the morgue the previous week. The man had a single bullet wound in between his eyes, execution style. A thick line of blood led from the hole down to his lips, and then onto his shirt.

Anna looks at a photo for a moment without reacting before asking, "What was his name?"

"You don't know him?"

"No. What was his name?" she repeats.

"It's an ongoing investigation. We cannot reveal any details."

"How old was he?"

"Like I said, it's-"

"Did he have a family?"

"Listen, Anna, I can't-"

"I'm not asking for any details, Detective. Just tell me: did he have a family? Did he have a wife or children?"

"No."

Anna nods, still looking into the dead man's eyes. "If you won't tell me who he is, why are you even asking me about him?"

"We think you know who he is."

"You think I am lying."

"Yes." Mac doesn't hesitate before saying it.

"You don't like me, do you, Detective?" The girl doesn't give Mac a chance to respond. "It's okay. I am different than you. My people – my family, my neighbors – are the ones you have made a living trying to, ah, _bring to justice_. This place" – she motions to the room around her – "has mechanized fighting crime, and I am synonymous with crime to you, regardless of what I've done. I don't blame you, Detective. We grew up in different worlds."

That leaves Mac and Danny quiet for a few beats.

"Detectives, I know nothing about this poor man's murder. You can ask me questions for hours, but that fact will not change. I know nothing about Mr. Andropov, other than that he was always good to my family."

When she finishes, she looks reserved. She sits back in her chair, arms crossed, watching the one-way glass behind the detectives' backs, probably wondering if her uncle was standing on the other side, watching her.

Danny knows what's coming next. He talked with Mac before the interview. He didn't think it was good idea, what Mac was planning, but he is outranked here.

He steps out, and lets Petrov walk past him, into the interrogation room.

It takes Danny a moment to get into the viewing room, so he misses what Petrov, Mac, and Don all see: at the sight of Petrov, Anna stiffens perceptibly, but otherwise maintains a perfectly calm façade.

She had prepared herself for this. She knew, walking into the precinct, that they would probably try to use her assaulter to scare her into revealing something. She had her story ready.

"Anna," Petrov says. "_Kak dela_?"

"_Ya v poryadke_," came the girl's icy reply.

They go back and forth in Russian like that. Petrov maintains a devilish grin, and Anna's voice remains composed and distant. After they presumably had finished exchanging pleasantries – if one could call it that – Mac breaks in.

"Anna, how do you know Efreitor Petrov?"

"He used to work in Krasnokasmk."

"I still do," Petov interrupts. Anna looks at him with daggers in her eyes for a split second, and then her expression becomes neutral again.

"We ran into each other sometimes."

"Care to elaborate?" Mac pushes.

"He arrested my mother on multiple occasions."

"For what?"

"Oh, a number of things. Mostly prostitution." Anna remembers her conversation with Adam, a lifetime ago, before Petrov reappeared in her life. _My mother was a hooker_. "Can't Mr. Petrov himself tell you this?"

Mac ignores the question. "And why, when you saw him before, did you scream?"

"This man imprisoned my mother over and over again. I did not like him. I was very happy to be rid of him when I came to this country. Seeing him was… distressing." She looks at Petrov as she says it.

"Distressing?"

"Yes."

"You expect me to believe that, simply because this man arrested your mother a few times, you saw it necessary to scream bloody murder when you saw him, disturbing an entire police precinct?"

"Detective, I am very sorry that is _disturbed _your precinct. I had just recently moved across the world, to a country I had never been to – and one that spoke a language I am not extremely comfortable with – to live with people I had never before met. I was tired, and honestly uncomfortable being around so many police officers. My reaction may not have been perfectly logical, but I think it was at least understandable."

Anna takes a breath, hoping that she understands the distinction between "logical" and "understandable" well enough that her last sentence makes sense.

Don, back in the viewing room, would have given anything to Petrov's face at that moment – though it might have been a good thing that he could not, for if the Russian had a stupid, smug grin on, as Don suspects, he doesn't think he could hold back from punching him in the mouth. He is biting his lip to keep from confessing to Danny the truth about Petrov. He knows that Anna's story is decently close to the truth, but he can tell that neither his friend nor his boss trust her.

Anna was apparently thinking the same thing. "Detective, I can tell you don't believe me. Why don't you ask the honorable Efreitor why he thinks I screamed?" Acid creeps through her accent.

"I cannot even guess," Petrov says.

"Well. Detective Taylor, do you have any theories?"

"Listen, Anna." Mac is using his talking-to-smartass-hardened-criminals voice. Don clenches his teeth in anger. "Here's what we know. You know Andropov, and you know Efreitor Petrov. You seem to be close as can be with Andropov, despite the fact that he's a mob boss, and you seem to be terrified of Petrov, despite the fact that he's a police officer. Now, a man is dead, and the evidence points to Andropov, and Petrov is here to help us investigate. You seem to side with Andropov at every turn. That would make you a person of interest."

Anna smiles slightly. "I see. I'm a person of interest because I am friendly with your suspect and not with your partner. And because my mother was a drug addict. I do not know why, but I see that you truly believe that I know something useful. I assure you, I do not. But why don't you just ask me what you want to know, and you will see what I have to say?"

Don is shocked by her composure. He wonders if Andropov had ever primed her for what to say if the police questioned her.

"Why is Andropov in America?"

"I do not know."

"Why did he kill this man?" Mac points to the picture, which is still sitting crooked on the table in front of Anna.

"I do not know that he did. Nor do I know why he would want to."

"You are lying."

Anna shakes her head, looking defeated. "No, sir, I am not."

Don had no idea why Mac was so sure Anna knew more than she was letting on, but he seemed to be forming a full-blown feud with the teenager.

"Danny, you gotta go reign him in," Don says quietly, though the group in the room over cannot hear him. "What's up with him, anyway?"

Danny shakes his head. "I don't know, Flack. He's sure she knows something." Danny pauses. "Are you sure she doesn't?"

"I can't imagine she does. Even if she's lying about only seeing Andropov every couple weeks, what could their relationship be? She's sixteen; it's not like she could be his business partner. Lovers, maybe" – Don shudders at the idea – "but I doubt it. And how close would they have to be for Andropov to out of the blue tell her why he's killing this mob guy?"

"Yeah, but he did appear out of nowhere in New York right around the time she came here."

"Some sort of weird desire to protect her?"

"From what?"

"Lord only knows. Wait – did Petrov come specifically to investigate this murder?"

"I think he was scheduled to come anyway to investigate some Russian organized crime. Then this guy was killed, so focus shifted to Andropov. Why?"

"Just curious."

* * *

><p>After another half hour, Mac finally gives up. There a few forms to sign, and then Flack drives Anna back to his grandmother's apartment.<p>

"Anna," he asks as he pulls up in front of the building, "do you know why Andropov is in New York?"

Anna looked at him suspiciously, so he adds, "I'm not asking as a detective. I'm asking as your uncle."

His niece nods slightly, and then takes a deep breath. "He found me after school one day to tell me. Petrov was going to come to New York for some investigation. When he found out, he came to protect me."

"I thought you said he didn't know what… what Petrov did to you."

"I didn't think he did. He said my brother figured it out a few days before my mother died and came to him to tell him. He was going to… to make sure it didn't happen again." She blinks twice quickly. "I'm not good with English, ah… _euphemisms_. I hope you know what I mean?"

Don nods.

"But then my mother died, and it was all chaotic, and my mother was connected to Petrov in some way – they had records that they were in contact a lot – so if Petrov was killed right after my mother, it would be suspicious. He thought it might resolve itself, when I moved away. But then…"

"It didn't resolve itself. So he came here to resolve it."

"He's not going to kill Petrov, not here. It would cause too many problems for me, and for you. And I promise, I do not know why he killed the other mob man – _if _he killed the other mob man."

"Anna, I have to tell Mac about this."

Anna's eyes widen. "Please, you cannot," she says desperately. "Petrov will go back to Krasnokasmk, and my siblings…"

"Look, I'll figure it out. But it's pertinent to the investigation."

Anna is on the verge of tears. "Please, Uncle Don. I just want to keep my siblings safe. That's all I ever wanted." She whispers the last part, and then opens the door to his car, and is gone.


	13. Chapter 13

Lindsay, oblivious to the latest development in her husband's case, plans a dinner party a few days later. She invites the entire CSI family and their kids, who really only amount to Ellie and Anna, as Jo's oldest is out of state for an internship and both Messer children are staying at their grandparents' through Labor Day. Mac has to go to a cousin's wedding, and Hawkes gets sick at the last minute, but otherwise, everyone comes, cramming around the Messer's dining room table.

Anna is back to her bubbly self. Don watches her and Danny all night, but the two seem to have reached an unspoken truce. Don wonders what will happen when he gets around to telling Danny about Petrov. For now, though, he lets the two banter in peace.

Lindsay serves the kind of casserole that's easy to mass produce and yet still delicious, and compliments flow easily around the table. Rain pours down outside, making everyone thankful for the dry coziness of the apartment. It is a nice night. Adam and Jo have just wrapped up a drawn-out rape case, so they are in high spirits. Danny and Lindsay, who have been free of screaming children for a couple days, are finally coming out of their sleep-deprived zombie state. Even Jamie, who has been constantly worrying about her sister-in-law, is in an inexplicably good mood.

Conversation soon steers toward the girls' first weeks of school. Anna recounts story after story about her Russian teacher, eliciting whooping laughs all around. The two girls share horror stories about after-school practice in the early September heat; Anna made the soccer team, and Ellie plays field hockey.

After dinner, the group splinters. Sid leaves early, claiming he must have caught whatever had kept Hawkes at home. Jo goes to do the dishes, insisting that Lindsey rest, and Adam jumps at the opportunity to help her. He'd avoided eye contact with Anna all night, making Don smile. His niece had told him about the hooker incident a few weeks earlier.

The rest of the group sits down to play cards. Anna is happy to wield her newly-acquired bridge skills, but no one else except Lindsay knows how to play. Ellie suggests poker, which gets some assenting nods, so Danny digs his chips out of the hall closet.

Anna asks for a refresher on what all the hands are, so Don writes them down while Lindsay shuffles.

"So Ellie," Danny says as they wait to start, "I hear you have a new boyfriend. Jordan, is it?"

Ellie rolls her eyes good-humoredly. "Oh my God, let's not talk about it, okay?" Everyone within earshot laughs.

"Oh come on," Jamie presses. "Jordan?"

"Yeah."

"How long have you guys been dating?"

"I don't know, since January or something."

"January? So it's not actually new?"

"Not really." Ellie looks around for something to change the subject. "What about you, Anna? I bet you have a boyfriend, right?"

Anna smiles. "No, why?"

"Come on. What about this Jace guy you were telling me about before dinner?"

"Oh, no, he's not my boyfriend."

"I thought you guys hung out, like, all the time?"

"Well, not _all _the time."

Ellie looks at her knowingly. "But is he single?"

Anna chuckles. "No."

Ellie blushes slightly, giggling. "Oh."

"Wait," Danny cuts in. "He's not single? And his girlfriend is okay with you two hanging out all the time?"

"It's not all the time," Anna repeats. "And, no, I don't think his boyfriend minds us, how you say, _hanging out_."

This erupts the entire room in a fit of laughter loud enough for the dishwashing crew to come in, asking what happened.

"Oh, nothing," Ellie tells her mom. "Danny's just a little bit too heteronormative."

Anna and Ellie nearly hoot with laughter, and everyone else joins in, even though that none of the adults in the room have ever heard the word "heteronormative" before.

They continue on with their card game. Despite the fact that she needs a cheat sheet, Anna soon begins winning nearly every round. She swears she isn't counting cards, though Don is dubious that anyone could be so successful on luck alone.

Eventually he and Jamie both run out of chips. They just sit next to each other on the Messer's overstuffed sofa, Don's arm around Jamie's shoulder. There is something incredibly peaceful about that moment, despite the rain pattering on the windows and the loud yet good-hearted accusations of cheating flying across the card table.

For a while, he and Jamie try half-heartedly at conversation, but soon she begins to nod off on his shoulder. A lock of hair falls into her face, and Don tries to tuck it back behind her ear, but it won't stay in place. He chuckles to himself. _Her curls are as unruly as she is. _He draws circles on her arm with his thumb, hoping she rests well before he has to wake her up to go home.

Don turns to watch his niece, who wears a smile nearly constantly. Tears keep appearing in her eyes from laughing too hard. From afar, it's clear that something is remarkable about Anna's face, but Don cannot make out her red irises, which he knows to be the cause of the unusual appearance. Instead, she simply looks otherworldly, untouchable, like a goddess sent down from Heaven to beat mortals at poker.

It's captivating to watch her. Don is suddenly reminded of Jess Angel's memorial, her father's invitation for him to come reminisce about his late girlfriend with her family. He can see clearly the view of the Angels, talking and laughing and giving toasts, seen from outside the window. It's a picture that's followed him for the past five years. He couldn't go in, couldn't face the fact that she was really, actually gone.

Something is similar tonight. There is no pain to hide from here, not for Don, anyway. But he realizes he can't truly participate in the fun. Tomorrow, or the next day, or someday soon, he knows, he'll have to go to his boss and reveal that his niece is being protected from a dirty police officer by a Russian mobster, and that they can't tell anyone because that will just endanger her siblings, and he might have to beg not to be fired for keeping it a secret for so long. That knowledge weighs on him, and he recognizes now that he is happy he lost the poker game, happy to be out of the throws of excitement that he cannot share.

Anna's pile of poker chips grows and grows, and Don tries his best to just not think.


	14. Chapter 14

Sergeant Brinks, Don's boss, comes from a long line of military guys. Everyone knows this. The man doesn't talk about anyone other than his father, and then only when he's feeling especially sentimental and a bit tipsy, but it's obvious from the pictures that line the walls of his office.

Brinks himself served for a while, Don knows, but that's not even talked about when he's four beers in. He mostly keeps that part of his life a secret. Rumors have traveled, as they do when the truth isn't offered to squash them. He was a sniper, a Navy Seal, a killing machine. Hillary from reception claims to have looked up his military records, and says they are much more mundane, but Don doesn't really have any trouble believe the whispers.

But Brinks has always been approachable. He comes to the bar nights, the dinner parties, the birthdays. He doesn't talk about his time serving, but he'll go on about other things: his high school teachers, his summer jobs in college, his first and second and third wife. He acts just like everyone else.

Sitting in Brinks' office at the precinct, Don purses his lips. When he's there, in the bar, holding a bottle of Budweiser in one hand and a pool cue in the other, Brinks can't help but seem like nothing more than a friend to everyone who works under him. But now, as the man leans forward in his chair, elbows resting on his large, authority-giving desk, he couldn't be anything other than a disciplinarian in Don's eyes.

Brinks had listened to Don's story without interrupting, as he had asked. Now he is looking at the detective like he looks at the cadets who screw up forms so badly they have to let the deadbeats they arrest walk. Don feels the rage seep off the older man and flow throughout the room. Don wonders which one is the act: the friendly man or the no-nonsense boss? Surely both couldn't exist so seamlessly in one person.

Danny sits next to Don, but holds much less interest for him at the moment. Don knows Danny, really _knows_ Danny. They've been friends for nearly a decade. Danny's mad at Don, no question. But there's never any deceit there. He'll bitch and moan and, in a few days, he'll get over it, and they'll be back to going to Yankees games together. Don won't ever have to wonder if Danny is just pretending to be some down-to-earth guy.

Mac is there, too, standing next to Brinks, facing the two detectives. He declined Brinks' offer to sit. Don can't read his face, but he's pretty sure Mac's not exactly happy.

It takes approximately sixty seconds from the time Don finishes his story to the time Brinks erupts.

"Do you mind telling me, Detective, what the _hell _you were thinking? You're practically harboring a fugitive, you know that?"

"Anna is not a fugitive, Sergeant. Not even close. She's done nothing wrong."

"Nothing wrong? She lied to the police, withheld information pertinent to an investigation – I could haul her ass to jail right now if I wanted to, and you know it."

"How has what I've told you changed the course of this investigation at all? She knows nothing about this dead mobster – what's his name?"

"Ivakin. Valery Ivakin," Danny offers.

"She doesn't even know Ivakin."

"She is claiming that our Russian liaison is a child rapist and our main suspect is some sort of vigilante saint. I would say that's pertinent, wouldn't you?" Brinks has a habit of using rhetorical questions when he's angry.

"I know it seems like it is, but it's really not. So Petrov is a pervert – we've all heard stories about the Russian cops. And Andropov, he looks out for some people. Doesn't mean he didn't kill Ivakin, doesn't mean he did kill Ivakin."

"What is _means _is that we have someone very close to our prime suspect throwing wild accusations at a police officer. You're too close to this kid, Flack, or you'd see that that is suspicious as hell."

Mac butts. "Don, do you really believe this girl's story?"

Don isn't sure if it's meant to be a stupid question, one to jar him to his senses, make him say, _Of course not, Mac, no way_, but he decides to take it as face value.

"Yeah, Mac, I do."

"Well, then, there's one thing to do." All eyes go to Mac. "We gotta investigate. Find out if it's true. If it is, we send Petrov back to Russia. He's supposed to be here for six months plus, working with Organized Crime. If he does have this kind of past, we can't put him up on the stand to testify. Any attorney with mob money behind him would find out, tear him apart in cross."

Don sees Mac thinking like a lawyer and bristles automatically. "We can't. We can't send Petrov back. Anna's got siblings still in Krasnokamsk. Who knows what he'll do to them?"

"Don, I get it, you're worried about these kids, but that's out of our jurisdiction. The New York mob, however, is a problem we gotta deal with; that's what we are up against, and we can't have a dirty cop if we're going to take them down."

"You really think we're gonna take the Russian mob down, Mac?"

Mac glares at him.

It's new, this push back on organized crime. Everyone knows the gangs are the real issue, cropping up the worst parts of the city, recruiting poor young boys with nowhere else to go. But the new commissioner is obsessed with the mobs. Every few weeks he gives a new impassioned speech about "taking back the city". The Russian mafia hasn't had much sway in New York for decades, but it still exists, still rakes in unimaginable sums of money annually. Apparently the commissioner thinks that getting rid of it would solve some sort of mass epidemic, even though it's really the gangs that affect the lives of civilians. The mob mostly caused problems for the people in the mob.

Also, apparently no one has pointed out to the commissioner that the mobs are older than his great-grandparents. They've existed since the beginning of the city. They've shrunk, sure, after decades of police work, but that's only allowed them to reach a size where they're near impossible to snuff out. You can kill the huge beetle in your living room, but you have to learn to live with the tiny house spiders in your attic.

Regardless, funding is being poured into Organized Crime, and liaisons from across the globe are being brought in. Don knows Brinks and Mac both think it is a waste of time and money, but pressure from above means they can't just let this slide.

"We're not talking about the entirety of the Russian mob here, Don. We're not talking about forever. We're talking about the work of a crew over the course of six months. They might not be able to stop the entire mob, but they can get a whole hell of a lot done. And if this Petrov guy is as bad as you say, he could undo all of it."

Don's prepared this speech. He's ready to explain. He truly understands why they need to let Petrov be, after looking in Anna's eyes and seeing all her pain. But he's in a room full of cops, people who live on the planet of _bad guys go to jail, period_. Their world doesn't touch Anna's perverse life of criminal saviors and police abusers.

"Look, Petrov is here, isn't he? Even if the Russian police don't really care about their cops being upstanding citizens, they're not stupid. They're not going to send a known child rapist to work with the NYPD. Obviously, they don't know what Petrov's done. And if they don't know, that means there are" – Don pauses a second to count – "eight people who do know about this. Petrov, Anna, Anna's brother, Andropov, and the people in this room. Whose gonna tell the mob lawyers, if it comes to that?"

"You do realize Andropov is _in the mob_?" Brinks nearly shouts it.

"Yes, but think about it. He cares about Anna – I don't think any of us here think that he doesn't. If he cared mildly about her-"

"God, Flack, I don't need a breakdown of this thug's range of emotions, here."

"Just hear me out, Sergeant. Please."

Brinks scowls, but doesn't speak.

"If he mildly cared about her," Don continues, "he'd have killed Petrov already, because that's what mobsters do, right? Kill the people who wrong their friends? But he hasn't killed Petrov. Why? Because he knows that if he killed Petrov, it would open up a million questions. It would create a huge mess for Anna, right? Think about it – this man she claimed attacked her is now dead. All signs would point to her. It would be horrible for her. So he's thought ahead. He's not just a man with a gun here. He _really_ cares about her. He's looking out for her. He's thought this through.

"So there's no way he'd tell the lawyers about Petrov's past. Why would he? First, it would make him look like totally pathetic in front of his crew – he couldn't kill this scumbag after he wronged the girl. Second, it would fuck things up for Anna: Petrov would be sent back to Russia, which is the exact opposite of what Anna wants."

Brinks rolls his eyes like he's never heard something so stupid in his life. Danny looks from Don to Mac without speaking. Mac himself does not react at first, just stares at Don, eyes narrowed.

Mac is the first to break the silence, and it's clear he has the authority in the situation. Neither Brinks nor Mac is technically a higher rank than the other, as they work in separate divisions, but the Inspector is the boss of both of them, and, when it comes down to it, Mac has more sway with Inspector Horton than Brinks does.

"Alright. Here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna start looking into Petrov's past – but keep quiet about it." He puts a finger up when Don opens his mouth to protest. "And no on acts on their findings without talking to me first. And this conversation" – he sweeps his hand in a circle in front of his chest, almost as if he's wiping a counter – "never leaves this room until I say it does – _if _I say it does. Do not tell anyone what you're doing, don't even hint about it. Understand?"

Danny and Don both nod. Brinks grunts his assent.

"Good. Thank you, Sergeant, for letting us use your office." He glances at his watch. "I better get back to the lab."

Mac walks out unceremoniously, and Danny soon follows, leaving Don alone with his boss.

"Flack," Brinks says as soon as the door shuts behind Danny. "You're one lucky son of a bitch." Brinks doesn't say it, but Don knows: Mac's decision was an unspoken pulled-rank, silently telling Brinks that he was not to punish Don. If Mac hadn't been here, Don would probably be walking out of the room with a pink slip in the place of a badge.

Don stands up, thanks Brinks for his time, and walks out of his office.


End file.
